HAS there ever been a more incompetent, callous, corrupt, economically illiterate and morally bankrupt administration than the current batch of Tories who have brought Britain to its knees over the last 13 years?
This Conservative government has become a byword for chaos and ineptitude, staggering from scandal to crisis, the door of 10 Downing Street revolving for a new cabinet every few months, each minister succeeding only in heaping further ignominy and deepening the malaise.
The sacking of Suella Braverman as Home Secretary yesterday was long overdue, having repeatedly poisoned political discourse with her inflammatory rhetoric around immigration and other complicated issues.
Rishi Sunak was finally forced to take action when unsanctioned comments about pro-Palestinian demonstrations undermined police and served as a dog whistle to far-right elements, with a mob attacking officers in London at the weekend.
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James Cleverly now becomes the fourth person – five including Braverman's previous stint before resigning over a security breach – to occupy the senior government post in little more than a year.
Even more ridiculously, the man who gave us Brexit – the single biggest disaster in modern British foreign policy – has now been from re-animated from retirement to replace Cleverly as Foreign Secretary.
Aside from the fact David Cameron is unelected and will rely on ennoblement to join the cabinet, preventing him being held to scrutiny in the House of Commons, his return is proof that after 13 years the Tories have literally run out of plausible front-line politicians, being forced instead to plumb the dregs of the parliamentary party or bring back discredited faces from the past.
Sunak, while an improvement as prime minister on Johnson and Liz Truss – an exceedingly low bar – has shown himself entirely incapable of getting a grip on his party or setting out a coherent programme for government, with Northern Ireland left as collateral damage.
It is a indictment of the Labour Party that it has been unable to present an electable alternative during this time, albeit the last general election was hijacked by Boris Johnson's cynical weaponising of Brexit.
But with polls now showing it commanding a lead of 20 points or more, the Tories' days are numbered and the daunting task of fixing a broken Britain will soon become Sir Keir Starmer's problem.
With the UK's political soap opera evoking a combination of laughter and pity around the world, Sunak should not prolong the agony any further and call an election to allow voters put his clown-car administration out of its misery.