Just occasionally, covering Parliament gives you the opportunity to watch a display of such magnificent high-handedness, of someone displaying such total contempt for their colleagues, that you can only stop and applaud.

Kemi Badenoch, the Business Secretary, is regularly touted as a future leader of her party. Future Conservative Leader is an important constitutional position, usually occupied by someone who will never lead the party for reasons that are obvious after half an hour’s scrutiny. Former occupants of the post include David Davis, George Osborne and Sajid Javid. Occasionally, a Future Conservative Leader accidentally becomes leader, and the result is always disastrous (see Johnson, B., and Truss, L.)

“I’m certainly not an arsonist”

Badenoch had been summoned to appear before Sir Bill Cash’s European Scrutiny Committee. The fact that this sentence can still be typed shows what a poor job the government is doing of delivering the alleged benefits of Brexit. For some of us, the whole point of leaving the European Union was we would no longer have to listen to Sir Bill complaining about Brussels. And yet, somehow, here we all were again.

Badenoch is the latest in a long, long line of Tories to take a job sorting out all the problems of Brexit, only to discover that sometimes things aren’t quite as simple as Jacob Rees-Mogg pretends to believe they are. She was there to talk about Rishi Sunak’s promise to just shred, within a matter of months, all the laws we got from the EU over nearly five decades.

The Business Secretary has concluded that this promise was unachievable and counter-productive, and has therefore junked it. She views this as a sensible approach to a futile gesture. This is why she will struggle to lead her party: there is a type of Tory MP for whom the more futile a gesture is, the better. And a lot of them are on Bill Cash’s committee.

Take David Jones. He’s deputy chairman of the European Research Group, whose very name once caused ministers to soil themselves. It is now less of a power in the land, but Jones still sitteth at the right hand of Cash. When exactly, he asked Badenoch, had she decided to change the government’s plans and sell everything that Brexit had once meant, in return for a mess of potage? (He didn’t actually say the last bit out loud, but the meaning was taken for granted by most people present.)

When it came to her legislative plans, she’d sooner consult her cat

Badenoch leaned back in her chair, eyes raised to heaven at being asked about such a trivial detail. “Um…” she began, as though trying to recall the last time she’d cleaned the filter on her dishwasher. She really couldn’t remember, she finally replied, before going on to explain to Jones that he didn’t understand how things worked in the real world.

The government, she said, had never promised a bonfire of regulations. “We’re not arsonists,” she said. Possibly realising who she was speaking to, she clarified this. “I’m certainly not an arsonist.”

“But isn’t it the case,” replied Jones, mentally unscrewing the cap of a petrol can, “that a bonfire of unnecessary regulations is precisely what the Commons voted for?”

“I don’t think so,” Badenoch waved him away. There was no point, she said, in passing legislation that doesn’t work. Jones gave every sign of thinking there would be a great deal of point in this. He was now furious. The original plan had gone through the Commons, he said. “You then change your approach completely, you don’t tell the Commons that you’re changing your approach, you don’t have the courtesy to come before this committee so that this committee can scrutinise the changes!”

Badenoch was utterly unmoved by his rage, and gave him a look that suggested that when it came to her legislative plans, she’d sooner consult her cat. “I wanted to make sure I understood what I was talking about,” she explained, demonstrating that she is a stranger the Conservative Party’s approach to Brexit.

Besides, she went on testily, “we had private meetings, David. We discussed this extensively. And it’s public knowledge that we had private meetings, because when I thought I was having private and confidential meetings, I was reading the contents in the Daily Telegraph.” It was magnificent. You can’t attack Tory MPs for briefing the Telegraph. You might as well condemn them for singing the national anthem.

But Badenoch was on a roll now. “It is very easy for us to get into internal conversations about what the Lords did, and parliamentary procedure,” she said. “Out there it just sounds like navel-gazing.” Again, she had simply failed to understand where she was. You can no more tell the European Scrutiny Committee that the public doesn’t want to watch Tories arguing about Brexit than you can tell a member of the Sealed Knot that pikes and muskets are a bit out of date.

“Would you agree,” asked Richard Drax, “that the UK has still not left the EU?” At this, Badenoch’s patience was finally exhausted. The Conservatives had been elected to get Brexit done, she said. It was no good telling people “that we haven’t really left”. This was delivered in a sing-song voice, as though she was worried Drax wouldn’t know she thought he was an idiot.

In last year’s leadership contest, Badenoch got 59 votes from her fellow MPs. If she keeps this up, she’ll struggle to get into double figures next time.