Amber Rudd’s role in Boris Johnson’s ‘dream team’ was over before it began – how long will her next endorsement last?

Where the road to Damascus will take her once she gives up on Michael Gove is anyone’s guess. But it would be lovely if she lined up behind Rory Stewart for a quarter of an hour, just to cheer him up

Rudd apparently wearied of Johnson when they dined together on Thursday and she couldn’t persuade him to abandon his commitment to pursuing a no-deal Brexit (Getty)

If you have a morbid terror of the number 13, try to stay calm. The scorecard will tick beyond that on its madcap march soon enough.

If, on the other hand, you have a phobia about battalions of ego-frenzied Tories parading their god given gift for gibbering nonsense, be more afraid than ever.

The only treatment for that, according to an article in The Lancet, is a controlled coma. The piece considers alternatives, but concludes that, in a milligram less than a lethal dose, diazepam will be no more effective than Rory Stewart’s opium pipe.

The 13th leadership runner announced himself this morning. Sam Gyimah becomes the third person of colour, the second soldier and the first out-and-proud Second Referendumite to reach the Wacky Races start line.

The disconcerting news for Gyimah, who endearingly claims he is running to win, and not to secure himself a job when someone else does, is this: He has been a candidate for almost four hours, at the time of writing, and Amber Rudd hasn’t hinted that she might support him.

On current form, she could hint at supporting pretty much anyone, other perhaps than Amber Rudd, without raising an eyebrow. If her “allies” told a newspaper she means to back Willie Whitelaw in the first round, before switching to Professor Stanley Unwin in the second, Mindy from Mork & Mindy in the third, fourth and fifth, Roy Hudd in the sixth, Esther McVey from rounds seven to 11, and Zsa Zsa Gabor in the 12th, before settling on Emu to the end, it would seem perfectly normal.

The latest report about her intentions rings the death knell for “Boris Johnson’s Dream Team” – a decent name for a college indie band, but too outlandishly satirical for a genuine political entity.

Rudd apparently wearied of Johnson when they dined together on Thursday (no word on whether she let him drive her home at the end of the evening), and she couldn’t persuade him to abandon his commitment to pursuing a no-deal Brexit.

So it was that the BJDT, may it rest in peace, breathed its last breath before technically breathing its first. The dream mutated into a low-grade fever nightmare of reciprocal bitching.

Suffering a fit of the vapours at the idea (how very dare you) that their champion would go around dangling carrots, “allies” of Johnson briefed that Rudd made the chancellorship the price of her loyalty.

Her own “allies” hit back at once, counter briefing that Johnson offered her “a very senior role” in his government. The alarming implication there is that Rudd, being too high-minded to be seduced by a silly little bribe like that, toyed with supporting Johnson because, if only for the first course, she reckoned he might be the best in show.

If so, she got bravely over the misapprehension by the pudding. Her current intent, we read, is firmly to back Matt Hancock, the health secretary, whose plucky struggles with forming a coherent sentence suggest that sleeping with the Berlitz Pidgin English tape playing to his subconsciousness might not be the magic bullet solution after all.

Once Hancock’s half hour is up, Rudd will supposedly move behind Michael Gove. He is expected to hang around as a contender after surviving a trio of bottom two elimination bum-squeakers against Anthea Redfern, Penny Mordaunt, and Dr Rhodes Boyson.

Where the road to Damascus takes Rudd after she gives up on Gove is anyone’s guess. But it would be awfully nice if she lined up squarely behind Rory Stewart for a quarter of an hour, just to cheer him up.

Has anyone ever looked so ravaged by melancholy as our latter day Lawrence of Arabia as he traverses the arid deserts of Brexit Britain posting selfies of despair?

The pseudo-science of physiognomy (reading character from facial features) hasn’t been in vogue since the Victorian era. But you have to suspect that the emaciated gloom is the manifestation of his belated realisation that he shares a political home with the lobotomy ward from One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest.

If Stewart’s face is the physical reflection of disbelief at the infantile self-indulgence of his colleagues, it speaks (and more lucidly than Hancock could manage in words) for a nation rubbernecking the approaching multiple vehicle pile-up with a mixture of ghoulish fascination and visceral disgust.

It can’t be many days before the current baker’s dozen is closer a score. Titans like Sir Graham Brady, so adept at reading out numbers in his previous capacity as 1922 committee chairman, will be honour bound to join such messiah wannabes as Mark Harper.

How much longer can ERG snowflake supreme Steve Baker shut his ears to the public clamour?

The day may yet dawn when Rudd, after lending her unflinching support to every anti-no dealer in the field, reluctantly concludes that no one else is capable of uniting the country. If so, she is expected to back herself for eight hours, before deciding on tactical grounds to move her and her “allies” behind Stanley Baldwin.

For decades, Tory MPs have delighted in knowing themselves as “the most sophisticated electorate in the world”. Even in its initial stages, Rudd’s amazing journey of self-discovery and the clinical calculations that fuel it prove the point.

Nothing in modern history, not even the collective decision to forward Iain Duncan Smith’s name to the membership, has underlined their unique sophistication like this.