The Sketch: Tune in to the Simpsons while the country switches off the Conservatives

This conference is surely some sort of last chance for Mr Thing. His once great party has lost its heart, lost its head, lost its way. Lost its bottle too, come to that. What can he do? Apart from resigning? Can he snatch Mrs Thatcher's handbag back from Tony Blair? And would it help if he did?

In a caring sort of way, The Guardian published an annihilating poll yesterday showing conclusively that most voters preferred their cat as a potential Prime Minister than the Tory leader. Even more surprising, voters preferred the leader of the Liberal Democrats to Mr Thing. It's worth spelling that out. While Tony Blair scored 42 points as "best Prime Minister" and Charles Kennedy scored 19, Iain Thing scored 14 points. Bottom. Last. Right round the S-bend of the aushaus throttling pit.

On the question of which party was "in tune with issues that matter to me", it was worse. The Tories stood at -38. Minus 38! It was this that made some sense of Theresa May's widely-praised launch speech. Out of 38 new Tory MPs at the last election, just one was a woman. It was a disgrace, she said to applause, "and it will never be allowed to happen again".

So they're still talking to themselves. It's therapy. They're still in analysis. The talking cure. Voters don't want to watch Tories talking to themselves. It's policies we've been begging for. What does it mean to be a Conservative these days? What would Tories do in office? What do they want to do? How would it work? Who'd pay for it? It's pitiful how little they've done.

We were promised 25 new policies. The summary sheet contains half a dozen ideas. Two are Labour policy, one isn't a policy at all, and two (Lifetime Savings Accounts and State scholarships) are interesting but old. The package, in short, could have been thrown together in the first six weeks of Mr Thing's election.

There has been no sense of a coherent, interconnected, costed, thought-through policy platform from which to reach out into the electorate.

The big problem to address is this headless, heartless incoherence. They haven't done it. Theresa May demands new, anti-confrontational politics and Tim Collins immediately puts in a performance that would have been noisy at Nuremberg.

No, it was all wrong. The scheduling of the speakers was all wrong. The message co-ordination was all wrong. Putting up health after first-edition deadlines is perverse even by the standards of the party. "It's to allow people to see it for themselves, after work," they explained. Have they no idea what's on television at 7pm? It's two consecutive episodes of the little yellow cartoon characters. How can Dr Fox compete with them? Mr Burns is running for governor on the back of a mutant, three-eyed fish, and Dr Fox is explaining that he's endorsing Alan Milburn's plans for foundation hospitals. What shall we watch? The genuinely radical idea in education was buried and, even when exhumed, it failed to persuade. Money is to follow the child and parents to start their own state-funded schools. It was crushingly clear Damian Green hadn't planned it or costed it. They're as far from home as they've ever been.