(22.05.2019)

The Tory leadership knows this as well as you or I do, and is so embarrassed by it that it has scarcely campaigned. The Party’s website front page bears no reference to tomorrow’s poll. Its Twitter feed is so embarrassed that it has put up plugs for the cause only over the last 24 hours. At least one campaigning leaflet doesn’t mention Brexit at all.

A single photo sums the situation up – of a despondent May leaving the stage, at a campaign launch with no audience present and a single journalist reporting, while Ashley Fox winces in the background and three cheerless other candidates fail to raise a single smile between them. It is the photographic equivalent of clinical depression.