Cometh the hour, cometh Henry Bolton, prime minister

One by one, the resignations had come. People no one had ever heard of, quitting jobs that no one knew existed. By mid-afternoon, more than half the Ukip frontbench team had done a bunk in protest at Henry Bolton’s continued leadership of the party. At least, that was a best guess figure; it was hard to keep an exact tally of who had gone and when, since a few members had to reannounce their resignations as no one had noticed when they had done so the first time around last week.

All the while, Bolton remained holed up in a Folkestone hotel room. Just around the corner from his apartment. No one was going to take him alive. Bolton was genuinely perplexed. His only crime had been to fall in love with a woman half his age with racist views, who had happened to join a party that attracted racists of which he was leader. What could possibly be more normal than that? Now, if he had copped off with someone in her 50s who supported immigration and was pro-EU, that would have been a story. People were just jealous of his pulling power.

The Ukip leader paced his room, counting down the minutes until his 4pm press conference at the back entrance of the hotel. He’d left it that late in the day because he had wanted to catch the opening rounds of the World Indoor Bowls Championships on BBC2. Unmissable. It was just sheer bad luck that one match had been such a nailbiter that he’d absent-mindedly wandered out the front of the hotel by mistake. By which time, the Ukip press office had already released a statement saying he’d be staying on as leader.

Undaunted – largely because he had no idea the news was already out – Bolton fought his way past the dustbins and headed down the potholed drive towards where the press were assembled. “Yesterday, the Ukip national executive committee ... ” he began.

“Excuse me, Mr Bolton,” shouted one reporter. “We can’t hear you. Would you mind stepping forward several paces to where the microphones are, please?”

What had started as Alan Partridge was rapidly turning into both Fawlty and Blackadder. As if suspecting a cunning plan, Bolton nervously inched his way towards the cameras and started reading out his statement for a second time. It wasn’t him that was the problem, it was the party’s NEC, he insisted. A bunch of small-minded prudes who were now suffering from buyers’ regret at having chosen a leader with such powerful animal magnetism just a few months earlier.

“I respect the next steps in the constitutional process and will therefore not be resigning as party leader,” he said. “I repeat, I shall not be resigning as party leader.” That repetition was as much for his own benefit as anyone else’s. He sounded as if he couldn’t quite believe what he was saying himself. Far from quitting, he was proposing to put himself forward as the man who could unite all the leave campaigns. Step aside, Theresa May. Cometh the hour, cometh the man. Henry was putting himself forward as prime minister.

The statement lasted just a few minutes, after which Bolton scuttled back indoors, muttering “No comment” while being pursued by reporters who had been gifted unexpected gold dust. Some even wondered if Bolton hadn’t been a fifth columnist all along who had set out to destroy Ukip from within.

But that was to miss the point. This was a party hellbent on presenting its death throes as award-winning entertainment. Nothing more, nothing less. There was no great conspiracy. As so often in the past with Ukip, the whole thing had just been a bit of a cock-up. Only in Bolton’s case, the cock-up had been literal.