It was a fortnight ago in the dingy basement of a dive bar in London’s Soho that the Tory Party’s fate was finally sealed. As the 1980s hit Don’t Stop Believin’ blared out across the Arts Theatre Club, a senior No 10 adviser and leading Tory rebel eyed each other warily.

Rishi Sunak’s aide exclaimed in exasperation: ‘Why are you doing this? All that’s going to happen is you’ll hand the Election to Starmer.’

‘You came for us,’ the plotter replied. ‘We didn’t have any choice.’ Then he paused. ‘But you’re right,’ he admitted, ‘it can’t go on like this.’

The plot to topple Sunak is over.

Losing Conservative candidate David Jones at the count in Blackpool South on Thursday.  The Tory Party has suffered its worst local election results in almost half a century

Despite the worst local election results for the Tory Party in almost half a century, the disparate group of backbench MPs nicknamed The Five Families have decided to sue for peace. ‘There’s no point in trying to remove Rishi now,’ one MP told me. ‘We don’t have enough MPs’ votes, and even if we did, we don’t have a candidate.’

So the Conservative Party is united. The One Nation Liberals, The Red Wallers, The Spartans, the New Conservatives, The Pop Cons – all are together at last. Marching themselves and their party towards electoral oblivion.

As the local election results began to trickle in on Thursday night, Tory officials reached wearily for their pre-crafted lines to take. Conservative Party Chairman Richard Holden claimed the results were ‘typical for a government mid-term’.

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But we are not mid-term. A General Election is just months away. This is the moment in the electoral cycle when public opinion is supposed to swing grudgingly back towards the governing party. Instead, it’s lurching decisively in the other direction. The polls are beginning to show the Tories slipping below 20 per cent, with Reform snapping at their heels. And this is before Nigel Farage’s expected return to the front line.

Rishi Sunak’s great political reset. His ‘narrative-shifting’ conference speech. The ‘game-changing’ Budget. Each has been... and gone.

And as every month has passed, so another nail has been driven into the Tory casket.

At the start of the year – the year of the Great Conservative Fightback – Sir Keir Starmer enjoyed an average 18-point poll lead. It has now risen to 21 points.

There will be no fightback. Because there is no longer any fight left in the Tory Party.

By shelving plans to remove Sunak – a leader who, in the public’s eyes, is performing worse than Liz Truss did – the Conservatives have run up the white flag.

One Minister told me last week: ‘I still think we can turn things round. Keir Starmer isn’t Blair.’

Correct. He isn’t Tony Blair. And yet he is outperforming Blair both in the polls, and in actual votes cast at the ballot box. Which just proves how bankrupt the Tories’ ‘Stick With Rishi And Something Might Turn Up’ strategy is.

What is Sunak’s actual plan to turn his party’s political fortunes around? At the moment, it seems to comprise three – equally self-defeating – components.

First, an inexplicable desire to smother the nation beneath a blanket of nanny-stateism. Smoking bans. Bans on mobile phones for teenagers. Restrictions on gambling. Policies so divorced from people’s priorities that they simply reinforce the impression the Prime Minister exists not so much in a bubble, as a bubble on a planet located in a distant galaxy.

Second, Sunak is pinning his entire domestic agenda on ‘stopping the boats’. Yet last week we saw just how likely he is to achieve that aim. No 10 tried to spin the Rwanda scheme was already producing results, with the first asylum-seeker removed to Kigali. It then transpired this sole deportee had been paid £3,000 and had gone voluntarily.

An attempt to remove refugees to the Bibby Stockholm barge in Dorset ended when the coach taking them was surrounded by a mob and its tyres were slashed.

The Home Office then announced 711 migrants had crossed the Channel in a single day, the highest number of the year.

An attempt to remove refugees to the Bibby Stockholm barge in Dorset ended when the coach taking them was surrounded by a mob and its tyres were slashed 

And then there is the is supposed magic bullet of tax cuts. ‘We’ll have one more major fiscal event so as to deliver proper cuts,’ another Minister revealed to me. ‘That’ll be the last chance to shift the debate.’

It won’t. A further reduction in National Insurance payments, or even the basic tax rate, has become the PM’s Mrs Merton Policy.

‘What first attracted you to the millionaire Paul Daniels?’ the late comedienne Caroline Aherne’s alter ego famously asked Debbie McGee. ‘What first attracted you to the concept of tax cuts with an Election a few months away and your party 25 points behind in the polls, Mr Sunak?’

The policy is so transparently motivated by political self-interest that there’ll be no electoral benefit. Voters will pocket their pre-election bribe, remember the years of austerity and the cost-of-living crisis that preceded it, and cast their votes for Labour.

There are things Tory MPs could still have done to save themselves, if not their government.

Ben Houchen's victory in the Tees Valley mayoral election shows the electorate is still prepared to respond to Tory candidates who cut themselves loose from Sunak and his toxic premiership.

Allies of Boris Johnson claim the former PM is like a ‘coiled snake’ waiting to race to the rescue of his party.

Labour’s falling vote share in Muslim areas reveals their internal divisions over Gaza and other issues are very real, and could yet be exploited if Sunak could pluck up the courage to call a snap Election.

But the Conservative Party is all out of courage.

So its MPs have opted to act like the political equivalent of the passengers in that festive disaster movie The Poseidon Adventure. Rather than join Gene Hackman’s character clambering up the Christmas tree in one bold, final attempt at escape, they have chosen to stay with the ship’s purser.

And so red wave after red wave will continue to flood into their doomed vessel, it will eventually disappear beneath the waves, and everyone and everything will be lost. Yet before that moment arrives, Britain must endure a few more months of national purgatory. Leaderless. Directionless. Visionless.

At least we now know for certain how it ends. In craven capitulation. And with a once stout political party abandoning itself, and the British people, to their fate.