Tory power is only sustained by cruel confidence tricks | Frankie Boyle

Many people are shocked that Theresa May having a cough during a speech is considered a sackable offence; especially from a party that could witness someone having a full-blown epileptic fit and still have them assessed as fit to drive a crane. Theresa is no stranger to coughs: her total lack of charisma means she has do at least a dozen of them to get her reflection to come to the mirror. Admittedly, she had the kind of conference breakdown where if she was a car she’d have been set on fire and rolled into a quarry. May’s attempts to deal with Brexit have all the conviction of someone whose long-term partner has developed a new fetish. You feel like saying, “Look, your heart isn’t in this, stop clinging to the pain and pass it on to someone who’s already bought the rubber sheets.”

The cabinet have been making supportive noises, the Jaws theme of the Tory leadership. When asked if they would like to be PM, the prospective candidate always says no, and adds that Theresa May is doing, “an excellent job”. By which they mean being prime minister is an excellent job and they’d happily perform transplant surgery on themselves with some Christmas cracker nail-clippers for the chance to replace her.

They say the PM is doing an excellent job but that can’t be true because, let’s face it, no one in the UK is doing an excellent job. Look around you. Stop reading this and have a look at your colleagues. Check out the waitress. Your fellow commuter. Your spouse, parents, children. None of them are doing an excellent job. I’m sure at some point in this country’s history someone, somewhere did an excellent job. But sadly we’ll never know who that person was, because whoever it was that should have recorded the fact was doing a piss-poor job. And don’t think I’m doing an excellent job. I’m not. I’m watching the word count build up and when it hits the magic number I stop. Even if my very next thought was something to rival Flaubert, I’d let that thought shrivel in my skull and rot for a week like a windfall apple.

May’s position has been strengthened by an abortive coup led by Grant Shapps, which was like watching a wounded antelope trying to bring down a wounded antelope. The Conservatives have never been a party burdened by needless sentimentality; some MPs only keep their children’s photos in their wallet to make sure that at the end of term they don’t bring the wrong one home. No doubt her rivals will keep May in position while she retains some brief usefulness, like when a bank robber in a movie holds a dead body in front of them to soak up the bullets. Also backing May is John Major, who can’t stab anyone in the back after his knife got accidentally cremated in 2013. How enlightening it must be to exist as Theresa May at this moment in history. To live while still dead must give you an almost Buddhist level of insight: to attend meetings, give speeches, avoid questions, as a vertical cadaver; propelled by a sort of furious nothing.

Perhaps the next leader will be Boris Johnson, a man who sees genocide as the first stage of a planning application. Boris, a malevolent baked Alaska, is living out in public the great dramatic sweep of a life that asks what if a hero, instead of a single tragic flaw, had all of them. Or perhaps it will be David Davis, a man who seems to suffer from the same lack of imagination as his parents. Or Jacob Rees-Mogg (a man who has taken the phrase “stalking horse” rather too anthropomorphically), who, when he’s not on the run from Westworld: Victorian Britain, seems to be one of those people who flicks through the Old Testament looking for the sexy bits. Rees-Mogg’s wife has phenomenal personal wealth of her own. Not sure where she got it, presumably by marrying him for a bet. Or maybe Philip Hammond, a man who could send a wooden leg to sleep, a haunted suit with all the personal magnetism of Paul Scholes’s accountant, glimpsed through a fog.

A good outside bet is Ruth Davidson, Boris Johnson in negative. Davidson seems quite cheerful for a British person, but by Scottish standards she’s pretty much Santa Claus. I can’t believe so many people are fooled by her. Don’t you remember Boris was a laughing panel-show goon too? The British public have the memory span of an abused dog who has been offered steak. She has the jovial, apologetic bonhomie that most politicians don’t master until 10 years after a disgraced exit from the Commons. Her success should at least be contextualised by the fact that there are plenty of places in Scotland that should be natural Tory strongholds, if only because of the sheer unpleasantness of their populations.

In an attempt to give herself some intellectual heft she recently published a longish essay of the “whither capitalism” variety (personal highlight: “The centre cannot hold. Or can it?”). The essay is a breezy acknowledgement of the problems of capitalism that concludes that government needs to “press the case for fairer markets”. How, or to whom, is left completely unaddressed. Of course governments can simply create fairer markets, with rent controls or stronger unions or what have you, but this doesn’t seem to be what Davidson means. Davidson seems to be outlining a worldview where it’s important that you talk about problems in the system and make sure that the government (which you are part of) is aware of the problems that it creates, and presses a case for greater fairness, to itself. Really the essay is a pitch for little more than a management style that is closer to the shop floor. It’s essentially a reminder to Conservatives to scrunch their face up in a concerned way when people are telling them their worries.

Sometimes I wonder if the Conservatives are the party to which Davidson’s brand of guarded joshing is best suited. She didn’t join the Tories till 2009 and, had the wind been blowing differently, she could have slotted into New Labour quite comfortably. Indeed, while her support for the union is obviously genuine, her proudly vacuous Scottish boosterism is exactly the same as the SNP’s. The Scottish press are uniquely incompetent and you have to wonder whether under national media scrutiny her Blue Peter campaigning style (never mind that, look at this enormous cheese!) would play quite as well. In any case, she knows that any attempt to gain the leadership will involve a damaging byelection against Lee Nelson, Baron von Boobies, The Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (splitting the Tory vote), and some bloke dressed as a giant haggis.

The Conservative party now exists largely to misinform the public, to convince voters struggling through austerity that they have the same interests as billionaires and corporations. The leadership may soon be little more than being the friendly face of forcing rape victims to discuss the worst moment of their life with a civil service cashier. Despite a deflating election and aftermath, the Conservatives probably still feel that led by a less dreadful campaigner, and with a less openly suicidal manifesto, they might win a majority. Tragically, as they hold firm at 40% in the polls after one of the most dismal conferences in living memory, they might well be right.

• Frankie Boyle is a comedian and writer