I don’t always read Marina Hyde, but her piece on the recent Tory conference in Manchester– “From Boris the Lion King to Theresa May’s P45 – my malarial week at the Tory conference“– is hilarious in that way a deeply partisan piece (think P. J. O’Rourke) can be.

Though when you have Boris Johnson as a target, it’s hard to go wrong.

He’s not so much a cabinet minister as an event horizon.

Almost entirely because of Boris, the Tories now resemble a franchise of the reality-TV show Real Housewives: a cast of behaviourally incontinent people with zero idea of how to act when people are looking at them, with the most ambitious star seemingly having decided that conflict is winsome. Boris’s May-undermining Sun interview on the eve of conference was the intellectual equivalent of pouring a whisky sour over the head of someone called Cristee, yet was analysed as though it were one of Talleyrand’s more complex gambits. According to what one cabinet minister told the FT: “Boris’s own psychology is a matter of infinite fascination.” Only to Boris, surely.

As a bonus, there’s this bit about Katie Hopkins:

No one could fail to salute whichever Tory brain judged that this already toxic conference would benefit from issuing a guest pass to Katie Hopkins. It’s akin to surveying survivors of the Lusitania and thinking: you know what would really lift the spirits round here? A visit from Typhoid Mary. For reasons I briefly considered looking up, Katie had got herself up in a full wedding dress for her turn at a fringe event. All that effort and still only the second most irksome and publicity-crazed blond at conference.

It’s kind of nice, in a heaving-a-sigh-of-relief-that-it’s-not-your-trainwreck-for-once kind of way, to read this kind of thing from across the Pond.