When the Prime Minister cannot be bothered to listen to the Budget it sends out a pretty big signal to the country that there’s nothing much in it. Rishi Sunak spent long chunks of Jeremy Hunt’s latest financial statement on Wednesday chatting away to Treasury Chief Secretary Laura Trott. It was a wholesome scene reminiscent of one of those joint social evenings that neighbouring boys’ and girls’ schools in pleasant Home Counties towns sometimes put on for their sixth-formers. Compared to listening to Hunt, it must have been a gas.

Sunak’s semi-disengaged demeanour was emblematic of the Conservative benches in what was supposed to have been a key week in the great Tory fightback that clearly isn’t going to happen. Instead, Theresa May has just announced she is standing down as a Tory MP. And Sajid Javid, the first of the five chancellors of this parliamentary term, has declared that the prospect of waking up to Keir Starmer as prime minister simply isn’t frightening. This after trolling the remnants of the Tory vote by persuading Hunt to spaff a million pounds of taxpayers’ money on a Muslim war memorial.

This administration has voluntarily transferred itself to the end-of-life ward

Meanwhile a busy week in the Channel ensured that Sunak himself passed the totemic figure of 40,000 small boat migrants since becoming PM. The two polls to have been published since the great Budget non-event put the Conservatives on 18 per cent (People Polling) and 20 per cent (YouGov) respectively.

So much for all the talk of a May general election. It has always seemed more likely that Sunak will go on to late autumn on the grounds of getting to his second anniversary in Downing Street. As talented curriculum vitae assemblers everywhere will know, any less than two years in a post can raise doubts in the minds of prospective future employers.

Despite the unfolding disaster, there is no procession of Conservative MPs following Andrea Jenkyns and Simon Clarke in demanding another change of leadership. Nor is there any excitable gossip about a threshold of letters to 1922 Committee chairman Sir Graham Brady being anywhere near met.

There is a sense that Sunak and his top team are not going for the Labour jugular any more. Just as the Prime Minister allowed Labour to get away with its procedural shenanigans in the face of Islamist intimidation, so the Chancellor limited himself to some gentle ribbing of Starmer and shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves.

The government is now being run according to the theory that Lord Finkelstein set out in a recent column in the Times: that holding to the centre ground may not save the Tories this time but will still leave them better able to win most elections over the long term than a tilt to the Right would. So they are going down without much of a fight. This administration has voluntarily transferred itself to the end-of-life ward. Sunak will now seek to preside over the extinction of Red Wall Toryism and bequeath a mainly centrist rump to whoever takes over from him.

Give Labour five years, or more likely ten, to alienate the commuting classes and back the Tories will roar under their own rejuvenated progressive phalanx of Coutinhos and Trotts, Keegans and Chalks. For the outgoing top echelon it will be trebles all round in the House of Lords bar amid talk of Starmer being quite generous with big quango posts for those who didn’t cross him too viciously in the run-up to the handover.

So it is that a new British ‘populist’ moment will be averted and the nation state-fixated Right will get locked out by the globalists for another generation ahead. It is becoming ever more obvious that there is only one person alive who can upset this apple cart as it rolls gently along towards its dismal destination.

For now, Nigel Farage is carrying on being an avowed ‘non-politician’ in order to facilitate his media punditry. He could make big money in America this autumn as Donald Trump’s warm-up man. He could even be the next unofficial UK ambassador to Washington in the event of a Trump victory. Or he could stick it to the establishment in our own general election and clear space for something very much better. Do that one, Nigel. Please do that one.