Last Friday saw yet another unfortunate set of by-election results for the British Conservative Party.

They weren’t quite wiped out at these polls, but their results certainly fell somewhere in between the disappointing and the disastrous.

The Conservatives managed to hold their West London seat, but by a much-reduced majority of fewer than 500 votes after the ballot went to a recount, in a result which, as even the victorious candidate admitted, had more to do with controversies over the Labour mayor’s planned expansion of its vehicle emissions levy in the city than any lingering affection for the Tories.

More significant was the result in the southwest of England, where the Liberal Democrats overturned a massive Conservative majority of nearly 20,000 votes to take a 10,000 vote lead.

Most importantly, Labour comfortably overcame a 20,000-vote Tory majority in a constituency in the north of the country. It was the largest majority it had ever overturned at a by-election.

As the BBC’s chief political correspondent put it, these results painted “a bleak picture” for the ruling party.

They did nothing to reverse a trend which has in recent months witnessed the Tories’ spiral into an apparently terminal decline, as their past has continued to catch up with them.

Earlier this month, Rishi Sunak’s administration lost a court case in which it had been seeking to avoid releasing to the public inquiry into the Covid-19 pandemic the full and unredacted diaries, notebooks and WhatsApp messages of former premier Boris Johnson.

That’s to say that the government failed in its bid to avoid handing over materials to an inquiry it had itself established. Lawyers were paid by the government to argue against other lawyers paid by the government.

Absurdity piled upon absurdity when that government then threatened to stop paying for a third set of lawyers – those representing the former Prime Minister himself – if he continued to pass his own records directly to the inquiry which he had originally set up.

Mr. Johnson had said he was willing to hand over all his records but then claimed that he couldn’t remember the PIN code to access his old phone.

It was at this point that the reality of British politics gave up any hope of maintaining even the vaguest sense of sanity. It was as if Franz Kafka had written a Whitehall farce.

Also this month, a report into the misconduct of a Conservative MP recommended his suspension from parliament potentially long enough to trigger yet another by-election – the fifth that Rishi Sunak's government will have had to face in a matter of months.

This was the same MP whom Boris Johnson had appointed to a senior role despite being aware of allegations against him. It was that decision which had eventually provoked a string of ministerial resignations which led to Mr. Johnson’s downfall.

One of last week’s by-elections had been triggered when a Tory MP was forced to quit after admitting to taking cocaine.

Two others had been prompted as a result of Boris Johnson’s resignation from parliament after being found guilty of lying to the House, and the announcement by two of his most loyal disciples that they’d also quit in solidarity with their beloved blond buffoon (although one then chose to delay actually going).

One prospective Tory candidate for the job of Mayor of London last month had to drop out of the race, after allegations of historic misconduct emerged, when a female television producer claimed that he had touched her inappropriately ten years ago in Downing Street. He’d been working as a special adviser to Prime Minister David Cameron at the time.

Meanwhile, new video footage emerged of yet another lockdown-breaching party at which another former aspirant for the role of London Mayor had been present. That man was last month rewarded with a seat in the House of Lords by his old friend Boris Johnson.

Johnson’s resignation honors list also conferred a peerage upon a young woman, still in her twenties, a person of limited political experience who had served under Boris Johnson as a special adviser – apparently a very special one indeed.

Half a dozen other officials in his Downing Street team who’d been implicated in his administration’s own series of social gatherings that had broken Covid-19 rules were also rewarded for their services – or for their discretion – in that honors list.

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Johnson had also been planning to give his former Culture Secretary and loyal disciple Nadine Dorries a peerage, but her nomination was blocked by the vetting committee. That appears to be why Ms. Dorries announced that she was quitting her seat in the House of Commons, but then chose to delay actually doing so.

Complaints have since been raised about her “forceful” response to the decision not to grant her a place in the House of Lords.

Johnson had also in June bestowed honors upon other faithful acolytes, including Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg and Dame Priti Patel, Dame Andrea Jenkyns and Sir Michael Fabricant.

Those four, along with Ms. Dorries, were among ten members of the UK parliament who were criticized this month by the committee that had investigated Boris Johnson’s lies to parliament. They were censured for their interference with that committee’s work, through acts of intimidation and attempts to impugn the integrity of the process of the inquiry.

Another parliamentarian criticized by the committee was a former MP whom Johnson had enabled after he’d lost his Commons seat in 2019. In the immediate wake of this criticism, the said Lord quit his ministerial position, blaming Rishi Sunak’s failure to meet his commitments on climate change. The Prime Minister responded that the peer had been asked to apologise for his public criticisms of the Johnson inquiry but had chosen instead to resign; the Baron of Richmond Park (yes, really) responded that this wasn’t the case and promptly apologised.

These aren’t the only controversies still raging as to Mr. Johnson’s ways of honoring his friends. Indeed, reports are currently circulating that bad old Boris ignored advice that it wasn’t necessarily a great idea to give a peerage to a chum who’d been associated with a family history of espionage in the pay of a major foreign power.

At the same time, the public inquiry into how the UK handled the Covid crisis has started to hear evidence from politicians.

Boris Johnson’s Health Secretary Matt Hancock told the inquiry that the government’s pandemic planning had been “completely wrong”. He said that, rather than trying to halt the spread of the disease, the administration’s initial emphasis had been on the supply of body bags and on where to bury the dead.

(At this point, the nation of course may have recalled the fact that Mr. Hancock's own decisions had most likely resulted in thousands of deaths in care homes, not to mention the awarding of a lucrative medical supply contract to the former landlord of his local pub. We were also of course obliged to remember the horrific CCTV images that forced his resignation when it emerged that he had spectacularly breached social distancing regulations while engaging in a romantic liaison with a colleague in the workplace.)

Former premier David Cameron also admitted to the Covid inquiry to having made mistakes in the focus of the nation’s pandemic preparedness.

Cameron’s Chancellor George Osborne faced claims that his austerity measures had “depleted” healthcare systems and left the country unprepared for the crisis; but his Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt agreed with his old boss that Britain hadn’t been properly prepared, nor was it fast enough to act.

But that’s now the least of Mr. Hunt’s worries. He’s currently serving as Chancellor and is embroiled in the almost impossible task of sorting out the UK’s economic mess – a situation created by Brexit and exacerbated by his short-lived predecessor’s madcap experiment in fiscal policy – whilst, all around him, inflation soars out of control and industrial disputes have thrown healthcare, transport and other key public services into turmoil.

Perhaps the Conservatives’ lowest point came this month when it was reported that the Home Office had painted over murals depicting Mickey Mouse and characters from The Jungle Book at an asylum center for unaccompanied children arriving in the UK, on the orders of an immigration minister who’d criticized them for being too welcoming.

Some called the minister heartless or callous. Others might have supposed him to be foolish, nasty and petty. Staff at the center were said to have been horrified by his decree and had attempted to resist it.

This needless cruelty is perhaps, however, unsurprising from a man whose draconian new measures to “stop the boats” were this month condemned by former Conservative premier Theresa May as likely to “consign more people to slavery”.

The so-called “nasty party” has truly plumbed new depths of sadism bordering on psychopathy.

You can’t trust the Tories on the economy, on political integrity, on keeping trains running or hospitals open, on protecting people’s living standards or lives. You certainly can’t trust them to tell the truth.

You can’t even trust them not to be so inhuman as to deprive refugee children of the modest comforts offered by a few pictures of cartoon animals.

Even an insipid opposition leadership – recently described by a trade union boss as in danger of inspiring only “apathy” – has been unable to significantly dent the Conservatives’ prospects of a catastrophic electoral defeat within the next eighteen months.

So, it seems reasonable to suppose that reports of the Tory Party’s impending demise have not been entirely exaggerated. It’s not only tearing itself apart. It’s consuming itself in the fires of its own final, fatal, feverish rage.

It isn’t easy to see how it can ever recover from this. But its instinct for survival – so often trumpeted in its claims to be the longest-lived political party on the planet – will doubtless ensure that it eventually will.

This is, after all, the crushing logic of the ruthless pragmatism that’s for centuries sustained the dominance of entrenched capital.