The end of last month saw the resignations of two relatively junior members of Britain's Conservative government. One was armed forces minister James Heappey; the other was universities minister Robert Halfon. Both had already announced their intentions to quit parliament at the next general election.

When Mr. Halfon went from being Half-on/Half-off to being Fully-off, he did so with a modest homage to his favourite books, J. R. R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings trilogy. 

"I am reminded," he observed in his farewell message, "what Gandalf said to Frodo Baggins after the defeat of Sauron..."

Suffice it to say, it was a dignified but slightly surreal exit. Out of respect for our readers, I won't trouble to regale you with the 72-word quote that followed.

We might have been reminded by this strange dip into popular culture of the time when our lacklustre Conservative Prime Minister Theresa May danced to ABBA's 'Dancing Queen' at her party's annual conference – or the moment when former Tory Chancellor Kenneth Clarke quoted the 1990s music quintet Spice Girls in parliament: "I'll tell you what I want, what I really, really want... healthy, sustainable growth."

Older heads may even recall former Chancellor Geoffrey Howe's surprisingly devastating use of a curious cricketing metaphor in his resignation speech in the House of Commons in November 1990: "It is rather like sending your opening batsmen to the crease only for them to find, the moment the first balls are bowled, that their bats have been broken before the game by the team captain." 

His boss, Margaret Thatcher, was out of office before the end of that month.

One might wonder in this context whether the self-professed Star Wars fan Rishi Sunak, when his time comes (as it must), will end up channeling the spirit of Yoda, the diminutive and verbally eccentric Jedi master, as he hovers disconsolate outside the door of Number 10 Downing Street.

If so, he'll have quite a few appropriate lines from which to choose. Perhaps the most obvious of those comes from 'Star Wars: Episode V – (1980) The Empire Strikes Back: "Size matters not. Look at me. Judge me by my size, do you?" 

One suspects though that he might be tempted to echo a warning to his party to avoid a takeover by its less moderate members – the likes of snarling former Home Secretary Suella 'Cruella' Braverman or that upper-class Victorian stick insect, the definitively snooty Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg. 

"Fear is the path to the dark side. Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering," Mr. Sunak might well warn. "Once you start down the dark path, forever will it dominate your destiny. Consume you, it will."

In these dying days of a politically bankrupt administration, it often feels like we’ve entered the realms of utter fantasy. 

This month, one Conservative MP admitted giving out the telephone numbers of fellow parliamentarians in response to blackmail threats, after having sent compromising photographs of himself to someone he’d met online. It appears that at least two of those politicians whose contacts he’d supplied had also ended up sending similar images of themselves.

In an extraordinary intervention, the British Chancellor described his Tory colleague’s apology as courageous. It seems that a party that’s been in power far too long has grown not only decadent but also pretty much unhinged.

This is, after all, a government that is talking about restricting international student visas (in an apparent bid to destroy one of the country’s top exports and economic resources – higher education) and has even proposed (in a move which has shocked many in its own ranks) the effective criminalization of homelessness.

Earlier this month, even as the government announced a real-terms cut to university funding, Rishi Sunak tweeted that he was putting £35 million into his favorite sport, “I love cricket,” he wrote, “that’s no secret."

Related News

News from Nowhere: You Turn If You Want To

News from Nowhere: The death of trust

What he is keeping secret is the date of the next general election. In fact, he went so far as to laugh at an interviewer who was so presumptuous as to ask him when it might be.

Yes, insanity piles on insanity. One can only assume that King Charles waited until just after April 1st to announce that he’s planning to charge visitors a whopping £150 for tea and a tour of his Scottish castle in the hope that this ludicrous proposition wouldn’t be taken for a hoax.

It may be for similar reasons that Joe Biden, apparently bidding to Trump, left it a couple of days into this month before instructing NASA to create a separate time zone for the moon.

As the United Kingdom and the United States prepare for the madcap trauma of election season, the news sometimes seems to have lost the plot.

This surreal situation is exemplified by the fact that a popular television drama has at last galvanised the government to take action in relation to one of the most extraordinary and widespread miscarriages of justice known in the country in recent times, the wrongful prosecution of nearly 900 franchise-holders for financial crimes against the UK Post Office. 

Hundreds of lives, livelihoods and reputations were ruined as a result of faulty accounting software, families were devastated and homes were lost.

This scandal has been known about for years, but it took the public outrage provoked by a television dramatization of these events, broadcast in January, to make politicians pay attention to the plight of these hundreds of wrongfully convicted individuals.

Since then, further revelations have – like recent Tory leaders – come thick and fast, including reports that the Post Office was aware of the flaws in its legal arguments even as it was busy spending £100 million of public money on the prosecution of all these innocent women and men. The minister responsible has suggested that Post Office bosses should now be sent to jail.

You couldn’t make it up, the absurdity of our contemporary condition, a grossly fantastical post-truth history from which we are increasingly desperate to awake.

A couple of weeks ago, apparently resigned to his electoral fate – or simply drunk on power – Rishi Sunak awarded a knighthood to a businessman who'd last year donated £5 million to the Conservative Party, in an unprecedented round of Easter honours, which rewarded his friends and allies with handsome gestures of thanks at the taxpayers’ expense.

The billionaire businessman in question had last year agreed a multimillion-pound settlement to resolve a tax dispute with His Majesty’s Revenue and Customs. Between 2006 and 2009, he served as transport minister in the administration of Hosni Mubarak but was forced to resign after a catastrophic train crash had taken place on his watch.

The news of his knighthood simply seemed unreal. Broadsheet editors may have wondered whether their tea had been spiked with LSD. 

Jaws dropped at both ends of the political spectrum. While Labour denounced the “utterly corrupt” Prime Minister’s “blatant disrespect” for his office, the leader of Reform UK declared that it stank “like rotting fish”. The Liberal Democrats said that it showed the premier was “out of touch” with the reality of ordinary people’s lives.

Indeed, the arrogance of this brazen cronyism certainly seemed totally detached from any concern for the niceties of the real world.

Even the blathering Boris Johnson and that blithering booby’s doomed successor, loopy old Liz Truss, must surely have been scratching their heads in the face of such unmitigated madness.

Early this month, Ms. Truss attended the sixtieth birthday party of Reform UK’s honorary president, the bombastic Brexiteer Nigel Farage. A video message from Donald Trump described Mr. Farage as “prophetic”. It all felt pretty strange and strangely sycophantic (some might say sickeningly so) but perhaps it sounded close enough.

Next month will see the start of a new series of the UK’s most popular science fiction show, Doctor Who, now a major global franchise thanks to a partnership between the BBC and the Disney corporation. It will doubtless be wildly fantastical, but its usual weirdness will doubtless have nothing on this.