Sometime later this year, Britain’s Conservative Party will head to an election after 14 years in power. The polls are predicting a catastrophic wipe out, but as it is likely there are still months to go, the political commentariat are stuck in the rut of having to pretend it’s still a two-horse race.

While Truss was doing the media rounds to talk about her book, the headlines were focused on yet another scandal surrounding bizarre behaviour by a Tory MP – the kind that might have seemed too far-fetched if pitched by Iannucci.

The Times newspaper reported that Mark Menzies – a Tory MP who is no stranger to controversy – had called an elderly local party volunteer at 3.15am one morning last December, saying he was locked in a flat with “some bad people” and needed £5000 ($9500) as a matter of “life and death”.

The woman refused and instead called his office manager, who later stumped up the sum – which had risen to £6500 – from her personal bank account, and was later reimbursed from a campaign fund paid for by donors.

It wasn’t Menzies’ first rodeo either. In 2014, he stepped down from his government role as a trade envoy after a Sunday Mirror investigation found he’d paid a teenage Brazilian escort for sex and drugs. He has also been accused of getting a dog drunk, but a police probe was dropped and he denied wrongdoing.

Loading

This is just the icing on the cake for the current mob of Tory MPs, who have brought about a level of scandal and sleaze for the ruling party akin to the final years of John Major’s government.

In the past year or so, almost a dozen have either quit or been sacked amid bizarre wrongdoings. Earlier this month, William Wragg resigned from the party after his role in the so-called Westminster honey trap scandal. The MP and former chair of the public accounts committee admitted to leaking the personal phone numbers of MPs to a scammer on the dating app Grindr.

Scott Benton was also recently forced out after he was caught up in a newspaper gambling sting, in which he offered to ask questions in parliament, leak a confidential policy document or call in favours from parliamentary colleagues on behalf of fake gambling industry “investors”.

Chris Pincher resigned as an MP when the Commons’ standards committee recommended an eight-week suspension from parliament over allegations he groped two men while drunk. Former prime minister Boris Johnson was said to have dubbed him “Pincher by name, Pincher by nature” before giving him a job.

Who can forget senior MP Neil Parish resigning after admitting he twice “accidentally” watched pornography in the House of Commons while browsing for tractors?

And then there was David Warburton, an MP since 2015, who was sacked from the party following allegations in The Sunday Times he had harassed three women. The newspaper also obtained pictures of Warburton apparently posing next to cocaine.

Rob Roberts was sacked as a Tory MP after he sent lewd texts to a 21-year-old intern inviting her to “fool around”.

This is all barely scratching the surface, but you get the drift. Johnson’s so-called Partygate scandal and Truss’ economy-wrecking cameo were really just the tip of the iceberg. The Tories’ problems run as deep as imaginable. They are not serious people.