When, earlier this month, the Conservative chairman was imposed by the national party as its candidate in the safe seat of Basildon and Billericay, one Cabinet minister told reporters that the decision had gone down with local supporters “like a bucket of cold sick”.

Meanwhile, the leader of the Scottish Conservatives announced he was planning to stand for election in a constituency whose MP had been barred from standing on the grounds of ill health.

One reporter at his press conference observed: “It looks like you’ve sacked a sick man who wanted to stay as a candidate and put yourself in there. Does that not look quite callous?”

Within a few days, the politician was forced to quit his role as leader of the Conservative Party north of the border.

This was hardly the first Tory misstep in a campaign which has at times seemed like it’s been scripted by a malicious master of farce.

In their first televised debate, Rishi Sunak claimed that Keir Starmer’s policies would, according to Treasury officials, cost families £2,000.

Shortly thereafter, there emerged a letter from the permanent secretary to the Treasury making it clear that civil servants had not in fact been involved in the calculation of these figures.

The National Office for Statistics Regulation then called the Prime Minister’s claims misleading.

Labour called the Prime Minister a liar. The Prime Minister continued to repeat his dubious claims.

Money matters may have remained uppermost in the premier’s mind when it was also reported that day that his party had, back in March, accepted a sizeable donation from a businessman whose comments about the country’s first black female parliamentarian had just 24 hours earlier been condemned by Mr. Sunak as “racist” and “wrong”.

Things quickly got even worse for Rishi Sunak when he was obliged to apologise for his decision to return early to the campaign trail in the UK from events to commemorate D-Day in France, leaving the French and American presidents having to endure in his absence the company of his Foreign Secretary – the oleaginous former premier David Cameron.

He'd chosen to leave this high profile international event, and by doing so to alienate so many of his party’s grassroots supporters, in order to take part in interviews back home defending his claims about Labour’s tax policies.

The D-Day gaffe was described by the BBC’s political editor as an “extraordinary own goal”. It was an opportunity which the nationalistic Reform UK was quick to exploit.

A fortnight into the campaign, opinion polls were showing the Conservatives under pressure from a resurgent Reform party after the surprise return to frontline politics of the notoriously bombastic Nigel Farage as that party’s leader.

Mr. Farage’s popularity among his diehard fans didn’t even appear to have been dented by a rocky start to his campaign, whose first day had included a series of increasingly ill-tempered broadcast interviews and a member of the public throwing a banana milkshake in his face.

Of course, that didn’t stop him laying into Mr. Sunak for his unpatriotic conduct, during his first appearance of this campaign in a live TV debate.

More worrying for the Prime Minister, his decision to leave the beaches of Normandy was also condemned as “completely wrong” by the Cabinet colleague he’d chosen to represent him at that debate.

The following week, Rishi Sunak was still being quizzed by reporters as to whether he’d resign. This was surely an unprecedented question for reputable journalists to ask a serving premier in the middle of a general election campaign.

What further absurdities might unfold? What might he be asked next? “Mr. Sunak, are you a CIA spy?” “Prime Minister, are you a homicidal robot built by Elon Musk and controlled by AI?” “Are you a Martian space-warrior just fallen from the sky?”

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As of writing, we have no conclusive evidence to support any of those suggestions. But, given the ways in which insanities have piled upon insanities over the past few weeks of British politics, it would take a brave commentator to dare rule anything out.

Launching his party’s tax-cutting election manifesto, Rishi Sunak supposed that “you will always be better at spending your own money than the government is.”

This curious declaration was met on social media by confessions of ridiculous personal purchases, alongside many people agreeing that the spending decisions of the current administration certainly haven’t been brilliant, but pointing out that, unlike Mr. Sunak, most individuals can’t afford significant investments in the national infrastructure.

However, this mockery at the hands of the Twitterati (or whatever we now call them – the X-Men?) seemed almost forgiving compared to the drubbing the Prime Minister received that day from the BBC’s Nick Robinson in a half-hour TV interview which (as the right-wing Express newspaper said) “decimated” the Tory leader – and in which Mr. Sunak was described as having the heft of a “quinoa salad” compared to Nigel Farage’s roast dinner.

“You sound to me like a guy in a pub who borrowed £50 three years ago,” says Robinson. “He keeps saying ‘don’t worry, I’ll pay you back’ – and when you confront him, he says ‘I’ll pay you tomorrow’.”

Faced with this unremitting onslaught, Robinson’s victim froze like a deer caught in the headlights of a juggernaut.

In short, Rishi was increasingly looking like political roadkill.

The following morning, one of his senior Cabinet members suggested that people should vote Conservative, not in any hope of his party being in a position to implement its manifesto promises, but in order that a few remaining Tory MPs would be able to hold to account a Labour government sustained in parliament by what he called a “supermajority”.

Within a few days, polling showed that Reform UK had pushed the Tories into third place.

The Conservative Party’s strategy now appeared to have become virtually suicidal. The logic behind Mr. Shapps’ defeatism, if there was any at all, might have been to scare Tory traditionalists into returning to vote for them.

Or it might have been to suggest that the deeply unpopular governing party actually wanted the public to vote them out of power – and therefore that, if you really hate them so much, you surely shouldn’t give them what they want.

Later that day, the super-rich premier attempted to demonstrate his everyman credentials by saying that, despite being educated at one of the country’s most expensive private schools, he went without “lots of things” as a child. He backed up his claim of childhood deprivation by pointing out that he hadn’t had access to Sky TV.

He also in that recorded interview apologized for being late, blaming the D-Day events for having “run over”.

Well, Mr. Roadkill should know a bit about that.

That same day, the National Centre for Social Research published the results of a survey which showed that 58 per cent of British people don’t believe that politicians will tell the truth if they’re forced into a tight corner. This was a record low level of trust in democracy in the UK. It seems unlikely that this unedifying and often unsavory election campaign will do much to turn that around.

Nor will public confidence in British politics have been boosted by the news that Rishi Sunak’s top aide placed a winning bet on the date of the election just a few days before his boss announced it.

At the launch of Labour’s manifesto, Sir Keir Starmer was quick and clear in distancing himself from the chaos caused by this Tory tomfoolery.

“I’m running as a candidate to be Prime Minister,” he said. “Not a candidate to run the circus.”

When, during a TV debate exactly halfway through the campaign, a senior member of his Cabinet announced that you could trust Rishi Sunak on account of his record in office, the audience just laughed.

That pretty much says it all. It looks like the people might at last be about to run these clowns right out of town.