I love a party with a happy atmosphere, as the psephologist Russ Abbot put it. Since he was once runner-up to the Krankies in a poll – in this very newspaper – to find the most Scottish person ever, despite being born and brought up in Chester, his views merit serious consideration.

Mr Abbot, alas, didn’t contemplate parties with an unhappy atmosphere, for which you need to turn to Joy Division’s song of the same title. “Your confusion / My illusion / Worn like a mask of self-hate” accurately reflects the current atmosphere in several political parties. But then, though “a knees-up” and “a body of people united in favour of a political cause” are among the definitions of party, the word ultimately derives from the Latin for division.

Appropriately, in the case of the Conservative Party, united only in its eagerness to get shot of its own leader, but frustrated in that ambition because, as Ian Blackford astutely observed, she’s so incompetent that she can’t even resign properly. Even when she goes, though, the division won’t.

On Brexit, naturally, but also on her successor, now that my old colleague Boris Johnson is once again the frontrunner. Party members, particularly in Scotland, can’t agree whether he’s “a gift to the SNP”, as one Tory MSP put it, or an overall electoral asset. Some who supported the uncompromisingly named “Operation Arse”, designed to stop the former foreign secretary from becoming leader, now, according to some reports, think he’s perhaps the only member of the party who can stop them having their arse handed to them by the electorate.

There’s plenty of division, too, on the Labour benches, where the parliamentary party overwhelmingly favours stopping Brexit, with the uncomfortable knowledge that their rank and file supporters outside London and Scotland overwhelmingly favour it. Then there’s the division between the clique around Jeremy Corbyn and those who, being relatively sane, think that having a leader whose approval rating is worse than that of the Prime Minister – a Prime Minister with the lowest approval rating in history, mind you – doesn’t bode well for electoral triumph.

In the run-up to Thursday’s European elections, the principal achievement of the two largest UK parties has been to give those who want Brexit not a single reason to vote for either of them and, with unparalleled political deftness, to have made themselves equally unattractive to those who oppose it.

Given that lots of voters have traditionally taken the view that European elections don’t matter, and used them to give the main parties a bloody nose, and that these particular elections either won’t matter at all (if Brexit happens) or will matter a great deal (if it doesn’t), they can quite reasonably be seen as a sort of rerun of the referendum. So, while there’s no incentive to vote for either the Tories or Labour, there’s still a pretty fierce contest – or rather, two contests.

The first is obvious: whether to back Leave or Remain parties. Again, that’s a reason not to back Labour (because it’s unclear which side they’re on) or the Tories (who say they want it, but have failed to deliver, and are still offering a version of Brexit no-one on either side likes). The other contest is between the various pro-Remain parties.

Perhaps Remain voters will tactically assess which of the LibDems, the Greens or (in Scotland) the SNP have the best chance in their area, and vote accordingly. At least they can ignore the spectacularly miscalculated Change UK campaign, now at less than one per cent support in some polls. It’s quite likely, though, that the anti-Brexit vote will be split. There would be a sort of poetic justice in this, given that Remainer calls for a range of options, or a second vote with deal, no deal and remain on the ballot paper were a strategy designed to split the pro-Brexit vote.

There’s no such strategic consideration if your only aim is to send a signal that you still want Brexit. There’s the Brexit Party. Not only have they run an exceptionally professional campaign, but they seem actually to have benefited from a competing party, because Ukip – which is in terminal disarray – has taken much of the flak. In part that’s because Ukip candidates keep saying objectionable things, but it’s also because their party has a full range of policies.

In normal circumstances, you’d expect a party to have policies on which its candidates agreed. That is, after all, the primary rationale of party-based politics. But we’re not in normal circumstances, and one of the smartest things the Brexit Party has done is to concentrate on a different justification for a party: that it is a machine to deliver policy. And, to all intents and purposes, just one policy: Brexit.

This allows figures as bizarrely diverse as the former Tory minister Ann Widdecombe, the ex-Revolutionary Communist Claire Fox, Annunziata Rees-Mogg (sister of Jacob) and – on a “one-time only” basis – George Galloway to rally to the same point without having to agree on anything else.

Given that it’s led by Nigel Farage, and that almost every member of Ukip who dislikes being described as an out-and-out racist seems to have defected to it, I think we can all guess that its policies, if they ever emerge, would strongly resemble those of Ukip under Farage’s leadership. But for the purposes of Thursday’s vote – it would be a different story in any other election – that doesn’t matter.

Across the British mainland, they are so far in the lead in the polls that they have twice the numbers of their nearest rivals (34 per cent to the LibDems’ 17%); even in Scotland, they’re on 20% in some polls – a bit more than half the SNP’s 38%, but twice what Labour and the Tories, who are joint fourth, are polling.

Perhaps it is this success that is making some Scottish Tories reconsider their opposition to Mr Johnson. Here is a party with no policies, led by a bumbling, self-seeking, workshy, would-be demagogue who makes it up as he goes along and is, like the late Alan Clark, unafraid to be economical with the actualité. And they’re storming the polls. If it works for them, why not join the party? Not literally, but you know what I mean.