“Boris! Boris! Boris!” The few hundred Conservative activists gathered at the National Army Museum in Chelsea on Tuesday evening were going wild. Their hero was back! Boris Johnson, the newspaper columnist, father-of-many and law-making, law-breaking prime minister had come to save them from the Labour hordes. Everything would be like it used to be.

He looked pale for a man who has just come back from a Mediterranean holiday. Maybe he spent it stuck in the hotel, hammering away at his memoir, trying to remember which of the people around him had sadly let him down at each particular disaster. It was still him, though: there was the trademark running of the hands through the hair, even if he does seem to have been cured of the arse-scratching. Has Carrie had him wormed?

The return of the Great Blonde One, at the last possible moment, is a sign of just how badly things are going

The speech was his standard stuff, but the crowd lapped it up. It was the old religion, not the weak brew they’ve become used to. Minutes earlier, Michael Gove had urged them to be proud of their party’s achievements in government, and been greeted with applause that suggested the crowd, like the rest of the country, was struggling to recall what these might be. Now Johnson bellowed “we got Brexit done!” and they all cheered.

Officially, he was there to help. It was a good thing we knew this, because otherwise it would have looked like he was doing his very best to undermine his successor. He mentioned Rishi Sunak only once, in passing, right at the start of the speech. He attacked Keir Starmer at length, but the actual Conservative prime minister standing in this election was essentially ignored. Let’s be generous, and assume he feels Sunak’s virtues are so obvious they don’t need to be mentioned. Or perhaps he forgot that page of his speech. Instead, Johnson chided the audience for having forgotten all the great things he had done, as though someone hadn’t been reminding them. His message was supposed to be “Vote Conservative”, but it sounded a lot like “Bring Back Boris”.

“It was the British government” that had delivered a Covid vaccine, he told them. “It was the Brexit government! It was a Conservative government!” Suddenly they remembered they were the good guys, the heroes of their own narrative. Johnson has always excelled at making Conservatives feel good about being Conservative. Did he in the past, with increasing frequency, also make them feel ashamed of it? Well, all of that was forgotten now.

Labour, he warned them, was “pregnant with horrors”. The women in the room tittered: the naughty man had said a sex word! Reform? They were nothing but a bunch of suck-ups to Russia! “Don’t let the Putinistas deliver the Corbynistas!” he yelled. Journalists scribbled it down. Such a good line! Do Corbynistas support Labour these days? Details!

But though the audience, who had begun the evening embattled and beaten, were now cheering, this was not Gandalf arriving at Helm’s Deep, or Blucher appearing over the horizon at Waterloo. The return of the Great Blonde One, at the last possible moment, is a sign of just how badly things are going. Among people who aren’t actual party members, he is, politely, a controversial figure. His presence suggests Tory strategists believe that every voter with negative associations of Johnson is already lost to them. They’re now trying to protect the very centre of the core vote.

Johnson left before Sunak came on, so they didn’t share a stage. Was that out of a Sunak fear that a joint photo would be damaging, or because Johnson refused to do one? “I’ve got to thank Boris for being here, thank him for his support,” the prime minister began. He too gave his standard speech, apologising vaguely to voters for the state of the country. “I’m not blind to their frustrations with me, with our party,” he said. “We haven’t got everything right.” Although, as the echoing cheers for the man who had just quit the stage showed, neither Sunak nor anyone else present was sure exactly what it was that they had got wrong.

Two years ago Sunak stuck the knife into Johnson while trying to pretend he wasn’t

It was a fittingly pathetic end to his time as prime minister. Perhaps the saddest remark of the evening had come earlier, when Gove assured the audience that “at the heart of Rishi is a moral core that is unbendable.” Is there? How does this manifest itself? On Friday it will be two years since Sunak brought Johnson down by resigning from his government. That act should have been career-defining, but Sunak avoids talking about it, like a man trying to forget an affair. His approach to the entire Johnson time in office is to pretend it didn’t happen while apologising that it did.

Now that confusion in his “moral core” had been made flesh: they had been in the same place at same time, but not together. Boris had been present, but Rishi had not been involved. Two years ago Sunak stuck the knife into Johnson while trying to pretend he wasn’t. Now he had begged for the other man’s help, and not really got it. Before a small gathering of the most loyal followers, we were witnessing the Conservative Party finally collapse under its own contradictions. If only someone had warned them that they were like this.