Fourteen years in and with a list of achievements to include giving away our right to live and work in other EU nations, preventing homeowners from wasting their money frivolously by making them spend more on their mortgages, drawing on the British people’s love of queuing politely by extending NHS waiting times and rooting out nasty racists in our midst by accepting their cash and giving them the oxygen of publicity, what more could the Tories have done for us?

It looks grim, but fear not True Blues. Rishi is here, and he has a cunning plan.

“At the next General Election, I have decided that all votes for Conservative candidates will count double. I am playing my prime minister’s Joker card, which I have wisely saved up all this time. I considered using it last year to fix the NHS, but it didn’t seem so important.”

Some opponents are outraged. “That’s cheating!” a Lib Dem spokesman told us. If we doubled our vote, we might have as many as twelve MPs.”

But political analysts are not entirely convinced doubling the Tory vote will save Rishi’s skin. One analyst told us, “I think this is smoke and mirrors. He’s making it look like he’s trying hard to win and to save his backbench colleagues, but in reality, our team thinks it means that in some constituencies, the Tory candidate will poll as many as thirty or even forty votes but still lose their deposit, and Rishi will be free to go to California and work for Elon Musk, which has been his obvious exit strategy for some time.”

A senior Shadow Minister told us, “Labour isn’t concerned about this. Even Laura Kuenssberg and Fiona Bruce won’t be able to save the Tories this time.”

Meanwhile, the government continues for as long as it can get away with it.