“Just imagine,” Kemi Badenoch wrote in Tuesday’s Telegraph, “what Labour would have done if …” Let’s pause her there for a moment, because the Business Secretary is very far from the only Tory who has, as reality blasts down the tracks towards them, retreated into a world of pure imagination.

Does Shapps believe that the SAS can’t go into action unless he and Sunak are both sitting at their desks?

Grant Shapps, an unserious man whose installation in the pretty serious role of Defence Secretary marked a low point of the Rishi Sunak administration, roughly 58 low points ago, spent Monday evening asking us to picture a world in which Keir Starmer was prime minister and had decreed that he would not work after 6pm. Fact-checking the Conservative Party is an exhausting business, but here’s a handy rule of thumb: we’re now at the point where — and I really do very much regret being able to type this — they’re just making stuff up.

But work with me. Or rather, work with Shapps (something that, happily for all of us, the army will no longer have to do after Friday lunchtime). “Virtually every military intervention we’ve carried out has happened at night,” he explained on Twitter. “The British people will wonder who would be standing in for Starmer between 6pm and 9am.”

This raises some interesting questions. Does Shapps believe that the SAS can’t go into action unless he and Sunak are both sitting at their desks? Is it possible that Ministry of Defence officials, anxious to keep Shapps busy, have set him up playing Call of Duty and told him he’s controlling real soldiers? This is certainly a departure from the previous government position that Dominic Raab was perfectly well able to manage the evacuation of Kabul from a sun lounger in Crete.

Of course the Labour leader isn’t saying he won’t pick up the phone “if Putin attacks at 6.01 pm” (thanks for that fantasy example, actual former government minister Greg Hands). He’s saying that he wants to take his teenagers to their clubs and then enjoy a Friday night dinner with them and his Jewish wife.

If you want to appreciate how far the Conservative Party has fallen, consider that after agreeing to a border inside the United Kingdom, and adopting “make exporting harder” as its main economic policy, it has landed the final week of its election campaign fighting against faith and family. At the time of writing, Rishi Sunak was preparing for a Tuesday evening rally. Perhaps he’ll set fire to a Union Jack. The party’s total commitment to destroying the things it once held dear does leave you pondering the fact that Boris Johnson and Liz Truss were two of the last people to see the Queen alive.

Anyway, back to the fantasyland inhabited by the people running the country. For days the Tories have been emailing people and sending them letters supposedly from their future selves, years in the future, warning them that, as a result of their wicked decision not to vote Conservative in 2024, giant ants now roam the earth, hunting the few remaining humans with the assistance of killer robots. All this really shows is that we can add science fiction to the very long list of Things Conservatives Don’t Understand: everyone knows that using time travel to change the past never works. You send a Terminator back to kill Keir Starmer’s mother, and she just ends up running a donkey sanctuary with his father.  In this case, you send a letter back 20 years, and the effect is to so infuriate the electorate that they do exactly the thing you didn’t want.

Anyway, I’m off to the Sunak rally. I’m hoping he’ll punch a granny

The new iteration of this is a slick video in which a man wakes up in a horrific 2025. There is a power cut, and his kid’s school is closed, overwhelmed by Etonians who have been cruelly forced into the state sector by Evil Rachel Reeves. Fortunately, the power cut doesn’t affect his alarm clock, his electric kettle, or the radio telling him that about the power cuts, and over his morning tea he looks at the post: it’s bills and his newspaper, the snappily titled The Daily Tax. It is leading on a story about tax, not my taste, but one imagines this is what readers of The Daily Tax are paying for. His phone (fully charged despite the power cut, suggesting that Conservatives also Don’t Understand electricity) tells him that inflation has hit a record high and that Angela Rayner is going for a “top job”.

But then — phew! — he wakes. It was all a dream! He has, the screen tells us, “48 Hours To Stop A Labour Supermajority”. What a relief that will be, that he lives in a reality where he doesn’t have to worry about record inflation, or energy bills, or crumbling public infrastructure, or squabbling Cabinet ministers, or schools being closed. Nor indeed about post being delivered before lunchtime.

Who is making this stuff? Do they watch it before they put it out? Is there a rejected cut where one of the news alerts is “PM bans parties, holds parties” or “Gambling ring found in Downing Street”? I think it’s deliberate. Like every act from the Conservative Party in this campaign, it should be interpreted as a desperate plea to be released from the grim hell that is government. Just let them be free, to live their lives. To dream. To imagine.

Anyway, I’m off to the Sunak rally. I’m hoping he’ll punch a granny.