The Tories are as out of touch as castaway Phillip Schofield - David Behrens

There’s no word yet on what he was paid for this homily or on whether Channel 5 flew him home or just left him to stew. No-one really cares except Schofield himself.

But in Birmingham the stakes were higher. The Conservatives wound up a rudderless four-day conference there on Wednesday with 20-minute pitches by Robert Jenrick, James Cleverly, Kemi Badenoch and Tom Tugendhat – each spitting out rash promises that might sway the 170,000 Tory faithful who will pick one of them as their leader.

And therein lies the problem, because the views of those card-carrying party members is completely at odds with most of the rest of the country. Floating voters outnumber paying Tories by about 90 to one and it is they who will swing the next election. Come polling day the majority will gravitate to the centre ground while the conference-goers remain on the right flank.

A perceptive membership would recognise this and choose a moderate like Tugendhat on whom to nail its colours. The fact that he is the 16/1 outsider tells you all you need to know about the mood music.

In fact Boris Johnson or Liz Truss would have stood a better chance of winning back the ticket, were they still in parliament. Truss was in attendance this week, claiming to be on a mission to “save western civilisation”, though from whom she didn’t say. Guileless and still in denial, she was reading from the same script as Phillip Schofield, with only the names of the antagonists changed. For Holly Willoughby, substitute the Bank of England.

If Truss turned up at your garden party she’d be as welcome as a plague of wasps, yet the Tory members – the same ones who made her their leader just two years ago – embraced her with the messianic zeal they used to reserve for Margaret Thatcher. The audience at her sideshow event was stuffed to the gills.

Johnson was there, too, at least in spirit. His new memoir, timed nicely to upstage the proceedings, contained the jaw-dropping revelation that he considered invading The Netherlands at the height of the pandemic to seize their stocks of Covid vaccines. You can just see the wheels whirring inside the spinning heads of the membership: the Dutch are our enemies? Tugendhat sounds like a Dutch name; let’s not pick him.

Around the conference there was a similarly loose grip on reality. Baron Moylan, one of Johnson’s former advisors who remains Tory transport spokesman in the House of Lords, appeared to suggest there weren’t enough people in the North to warrant better rail services.

Railway investment worked only where you had an awful lot of people concentrated in one place, Moylan reportedly said. He’s obviously never tried to weave his way through the rush-hour crush at Leeds Station.

He later rowed back on the comments but he does have a habit of putting his foot in it. Six months ago he was accusing the Welsh of “linguistic fascism”. I’m not sure what he meant and he probably wasn’t either but it’s a phrase even Trump might have baulked at using.

In a week of mixed messages, though, the Prince Harry Award for caprice must go to Michael Gove, who unexpectedly revealed the big lie behind his government’s supposed Levelling Up initiative.

Out of Westminster now and unfettered by party policy, Gove picked up on Moylan’s theme by expounding on what he called ‘Treasury Brain’ – the Whitehall mandarins’ mindset that made extra investment in the North a non-starter from the off. Their logic, said Gove, was that since the capital had the bigger population, money spent in London would always deliver proportionately better value than in Yorkshire.

That’s still the case, by the way; the government has changed but the Treasury hasn’t. It remains as averse as it always was to betting against the odds. It would have used the same reasoning to block the D-Day landings, said Gove.

All this navel-gazing has done nothing to help the party cause. Exactly four weeks from now it will proclaim its new leader and it had better hope that a sense of perspective has set in by then. For unless it learns to take an outsider’s view of itself, it will be even more adrift than Phillip Schofield.