John Ashworth’s leaked conversation provided the perfect ending to this abattoir detritus-filled election

For Jonathan Ashworth, the consolation comes in triplicate.

First, he is an object of staggering obscurity to the vaguely normal. Anyone outside the enclave of political hyper-nerdery who claims to have known he was shadow health secretary as long ago as Sunday is hereby awarded summa cum laude honours in Boris Johnson Mendacity Studies from Trump University.

Second, what he said about Jeremy Corbyn, in the phone chat graciously leaked to a partisan website by his former Tory MP “friend”, will have shocked very few souls into changing their vote.

It hardly came as breaking news that antipathy for Corbyn in northern and midlands towns is the single most lethal biological weapon in the Tory arsenal.

And third, he might just be wrong. If Ashworth is absolutely certain of a Conservative majority, absolute certainty has been a spectacularly poor guide to electoral outcomes these recent years. This race has tightened, and may tighten a shade more despite his unwitting intervention.

At roughly 3-1, the odds against a hung parliament are way shorter compared to 2017’s election.

It would be more a staggering relief than a visceral surprise to find some Tory bozo telling John Curtice, shortly after 10pm tomorrow that he’ll eat a truck load of designer hats if the exit poll is correct.

If you had to pick one bozo from so many, you could do worse than Matt Hancock. His cameo as Boris Johnson’s sidekick in the popular short The Knob Brothers Go to Leeds underlined his status as poster boy for craven dimwittery.

To walk into the arm of a peaceful protester, and allow that act of fifth-rate slapstick to be misrepresented by pliant hacks as a brutal assault, elegantly combined the hapless incompetence and yellow-bellied deceitfulness demanded by Johnson in lieu of genuine loyalty.

Whether Hancock’s lightning raid on the Keystone Kops’ cutting room floor leavened the fiasco as intended, I rather doubt. The image of the prime minister ignoring a picture of a tiny child with pneumonia, for all the neo-nativity play charm of a fragile tiny boy being denied a bed, felt too potent for such flimsy distraction.

The only person who might have watched ITN’s footage admiringly was Corbyn. And then only thanks to hindsight a day later, when the leaked Ashworth call educated him about the value of confiscating a phone.

But it’s equally doubtful whether that will make any material difference tomorrow. Minds about Johnson, as about Corbyn, were indelibly decided a while ago. Why would needless confirmation that his indifference to small children extends beyond the inability to count his own alter perceptions now?

This may be the worst election ever or merely the worst yet, but give it credit for consistency. What began with Jacob Rees-Mogg sneering at the Grenfell dead for following emergency service instructions ends with similar faux patrician disdain for a toddler with a nasty chest infection.

If Mogg is ever released from captivity, perhaps he’ll take little Jonathan to task for lacking the common sense to tell the ambulance to ignore protocol about finding the nearest hospital – and instead drive him 200 miles to Westminster, where there’s ample lounging space for pneumoniacs of all ages to recuperate on the government front bench.

If Labour loses outright to this monstrous cabal of terminally entitled psycho dodgepots and such spineless parasitic clingers-on as Hancock, it will have only itself to blame.

Well, that’s not entirely true. It will have an entitlement of its own to blame the BBC, which is as invertebrate in its post-Hutton state of cowering as any Tory whose private thoughts about Johnson would make Ashworth’s sound like a detonating Corbyn love-bomb.

The state broadcaster’s self-anointment as silent cheerleader for the side it expects to win leaves one heartrendingly obliged to agree with Johnson, if from a marginally different perspective, when he questions its right to the licence fee.

But Ashworth was right when he told his Judas friend that Labour self-destructed by failing to rid itself of someone incapable of being a leader in more than title alone. The defeat, if it happens, will be personal rather than political.

For Johnson, if it happens, the victory won’t be personal. He may wish us to regard this as a Love, Actually election (as if he’d do a Hugh Grant and tell a groping bully boy president to sod the hell off). Some may reckon it better resembles an arrestably elongated episode of The Thick Of It.

But the screen template that flits to this mind doesn’t stem from the tweely utopian soft Tory world view of Richard Curtis, or the savage satirical pen of Armando Iannuci. For untold millions faced with two monumentally hideous options, what is drawing mercifully yet terrifyingly to its close is the Sophie’s Choice election.

So the right result, or the least wrong one, would be no definitive choice at all. Please god, when John Curtice unveils his exit poll tomorrow night, let it be Hancock or another of Johnson’s abattoir detritus collaborators making the offer to eat his body weight in millinery.