Dominic Raab’s nice wife and kitchen are no substitute for his screaming lack of a clue what to do

The Tory party has been in full disease mode for some time now. The patient, I regret to inform, is all of us, and Dominic Raab’s kitchen might be the most horrific symptom yet

Some day, one day, it is at least theoretically possible that this politics column will not begin by mentioning Donald Tusk’s instruction to Britain, to not waste time, as he yielded to our request for an extension to Brexit.

But that column is not today’s column. How can it be, when a country still desperately short of a way out of the Brexit mess has instead been forced to spend its Sunday staring into Dominic Raab’s kitchen? Been forced, too, to gaze upon Dominic Raab’s wife, as she tells The Sunday Times of how he used to prepare picnics for her in Hyde Park, and likes to reads The Gruffalo to his children.

Yes, we are now officially at the Wives Stage (and, yes, it is all wives, for now) of the Tory Leadership Contest That Hasn’t Actually Begun Yet, itself an internal displacement activity for its own stunning inadequacies. Jeremy Hunt’s Chinese wife has also been making an appearance, winning praise in The Daily Telegraph for her being “effortlessly charming and considerate with diplomats”.

This will be an asset to her husband, no doubt, whose own charm with foreign dignitaries did not extend beyond accidentally telling the Chinese foreign secretary that his wife was Japanese, or telling the European Union that it was just like the USSR.

The Tory party has been in full disease mode for some time now. The patient, I regret to inform, is all of us, and Dominic Raab’s kitchen might be the most horrific symptom yet.

He wants to be prime minister, of that there can be no doubt, though there can also be no doubt that he has no idea why. David Cameron, at a similar stage in his career, once admitted he wanted to be prime minister because, “I think I’d be really good at it.” That, alas, as he accidentally took the country out of the EU against his wishes, did not quite come to pass.

Dominic Raab, on the other hand, wants to “inject optimism back in to the country”, which, to give the man credit, is an even more transparently ridiculous assertion than Cameron’s. Dominic Raab has smashed the country up in service of a woeful ideology, and now wants to be prime minister. Dominic Raab is loathed by at least 48 per cent of the population. There will be no optimism in the UK until Dominic Raab and his friends have passed fully through the system.

Still, after the kitchen, there does come the reminder, which I confess I had forgotten, that Raab, latter-day discoverer of France, did eventually vote for Theresa May’s deal – the one that he negotiated himself and then resigned over, which is not so much a U-turn as a miracle: a U-turn in which you actually drive into your own rear end.

Who knows when Raab imagines he will be prime minister by, and how much of Donald Tusk’s time that shouldn’t be wasted would be left. Not that it matters, because Raab has made expressly clear that he has absolutely no idea what he will do with it. What would be his strategy? “Seek an exit from the backstop and without it we would leave on WTO terms,” he breezily announces.

It was reported, several weeks ago, that several EU members were loath to hand Britain any extension at all because they would just spend it “asking for changes to the backstop”, so it is pleasing to see that the current second favourite to be the next prime minister plans to do exactly that.

And when those changes are not forthcoming, Raab’s own backstop will be a no-deal Brexit on WTO terms, in other words, to place sanctions on ourselves.

This is the world in which Prime Minister Raab will start delivering on his policy pledges. And what are they? Well they include taking a penny off income tax, at a time when the economy will be hundreds of billions of pounds smaller than it would have been had Raab’s dim dream never come to pass.

Still, this is the “optimistic” future Raab has in mind. How much optimism will he need? Who knows? To survey the field is rather like returning to the World Cup last year. Colombia... Sweden... Russia... Croatia... England ... one of these countries will make the World Cup Final. Raab... Gove... Johnson... Corbyn... one of these people will ... it scarcely bears thinking about.

Think of public life as a flowing river, and the low water mark is now so low that the snout of Raab pokes through the surface. It could even be that there are even rougher beasts down there.