The Conservatives in Westminster have lost the plot. They have taken leave of what little sense they had left after the Brexit wars. Boris Johnson has driven them into the realms of the irrational. It’s not the men in grey suits that they need now but the men in white coats.

Take Steve Baker, the leading Brexiter MP and a long-time supporter of Boris Johnson. On Wednesday, he was all but weeping as he urged MPs to show forgiveness for the only-human sins of “a brother in Christ”.

He meant Boris, the accidental party animal. The very next day he was thundering like an Old Testament prophet, citing Ezekiel, and declaring that “the gig’s up” and Johnson should “be long gone”. If only.

The only people who can get rid of Boris Johnson are Tory MPs themselves, by tabling and winning a vote of no confidence.

That would force Johnson to resign and hand over to another leader or call an election. But Tory MPs seem unable to cope with regicide – not something the party has had trouble with in the past.

In a day of pure hysteria, they rejected an attempt by the party whips to close down the whole partygate farrago by blocking Labour’s attempt to have Boris Johnson referred to the commons privileges committee for lying.

The Government has a majority of 80. This should have been a non cerebellum, as Boris might say. But many Tory MPs were simply not prepared to put their names to a motion that said their leader had been telling the truth. Incredible.

So, while the PM was parading in India like an overweight Bollywood extra, the Commons voted for him to be arraigned before said committee on grounds of terminological inexactitude.

This made no sense at all, procedurally or presentationally. The committee will have to decide whether Mr Johnson “knowingly” misled the House when he said that the lockdown rules had been followed in Number 10. He has already admitted that they weren’t followed.

But he will insist that he thought they had been – so clearly he didn’t break them knowingly. Just like the head of the Covid-19 Taskforce, Kate Josephs, who actually wrote the Covid rules and yet was also fined for breaking them, unknowingly, by attending a work party.

Agony prolonged

THE privileges committee has a two to one Tory majority. The conclusion is forgone. This inquiry will simply prolong the agony.

If Tory MPs don’t believe their leader, they should sack him. Perhaps some think that, if they allow partygate to go on long enough, the voters will get sick of hearing about it. Well, listen up because they already are.

It is ludicrous for the Commons to be preoccupied with parties when the UK is becoming deeply involved in the war in Ukraine.

The UK has become president Zelenskyy’s leading European ally and is now openly training Ukrainians soldiers on British soil.

Like most people in the UK, I support this. Britain has taken a moral lead on this war and has galvanised European counties into imposing unprecedented economic sanctions and sending arms.

However, war is never something that should be entered into lightly, even in a supporting role. Yet when have you heard any proper debate about this in Parliament?

What are Britain’s military aims exactly? How far should we go to prevent Putin winning?

Do we send Zelenskyy modern weapons like our sophisticated Challenger 2 tanks? These are superior to anything the Russians have but require highly skilled British personnel to make them work. Or should we offer to buy older tanks and aircraft from other Nato countries in order to gift them to Ukraine? The days when war-making was exclusive to prime ministers under royal prerogative are long gone. But when have you heard the Commons weigh up the pros and cons of Britain becoming Vladimir Putin’s enemy number one. There could well be a human cost. Putin has already made at least two chemical attacks in Britain.

Ukraine popularity

THESE issues are of grave national importance – far more worthy of MPs’ intellectual energy than who got a fixed penalty notice in Number 10.

Boris Johnson is not indispensable to the war effort and could be replaced. But he is immensely popular in Ukraine – almost a mascot. If he is to be removed, we owe it to Ukraine to get it over with quickly. It is deeply offensive for MPs to play procedural games when civilians are being dumped in mass graves in a European country.

So why do Tory MPs not do the decent thing and hold a vote of no confidence? What are 54 backbench MPs waiting for? They clearly don’t believe in Johnson, so why not remove him? We cannot afford to have a vacuum in Number 10 during a European war

Well, the short answer is that there is no-one in the Cabinet or the parliamentary Conservative Party that could do the job. Or at any rate, there is no-one else Tory MPs think could win the next General Election and save their seats, which is all that most MPs really care about.

Politics has become such a toxic arena in the Twitter age that few truly able and charismatic politicians are willing to serve. Johnson was a politician well suited to these times – an elite populist and media personality with a hide as tough as a rhino.

An educated version, some say, of Donald Trump. The party was right to elect him as leader in 2019. He got Brexit done, when Theresa May was gridlocked, and he went on to win a landslide election victory. The PM is, or was, able to speak across the new political divide, which as the former Tory minister David Gauke explained in the New Statesman, is no longer about social class but about culture and geography.

Johnson could speak to educated metropolitan elites, like his wife, while also being adopted by non-graduate Northern nationalists. There is no-one else in the Tory party who has that reach.

But the downside of having an eccentric, intellectual showman as leader is that they tend to be vain, disorganised and impetuous. They think accuracy and truth is for little people.

No-one to Truss

WHO could replace him? Tory MPs have looked at Rishi Sunak and decided he doesn’t fit, not least because of his rich, non-dom wife.

They are terrified of Priti Patel, though they broadly support sending illegal immigrants on a one-way ticket to Rwanda.

Liz Truss, the Foreign Secretary, has not had a good war and has little voter appeal.

Jeremy Hunt, the chair of the health select committee, is effective, intelligent and loved by the media.

But he stood against Boris Johnson before and was rejected by Tory members because he lacked any personality.

Labour’s Keir Starmer is probably the best politician in the House of Commons right now, and he’s so wooden birds could nest in him.

A competent Islington layer with neither vision nor wit. But we’d better get used to him, because the Conservatives seem to have acquired an electoral death wish.

By perpetuating Johnson’s premiership when they no longer trust and believe him means handing the next election to Labour.