Jeremy Hunt's grotesque Boris Johnson tribute act told us everything we need to know about the next Tory leadership contest

“And if we are to unite the country, we must deliver not just a true Brexit for the 52 per cent – but also a generous Brexit for the 48 per cent,” Jeremy Hunt told the Conservative Party conference on Sunday afternoon, before adding the payoff that turned the stomach: “They are patriots too.”

It was only a little lie. A lie might not even be the right word. A misdirection, perhaps. A tweaking of the historical record. He might not even have realised what he’d done, though I doubt that. But it was nonetheless the clearest example I can ever recall hearing, from any politician of these islands in my lifetime, of the kind of corrosive political language that George Orwell considered the signpost of a political culture descending into dark times.

“If all others accepted the lie which the Party imposed – if all records told the same tale – then the lie passed into history and became truth,” Orwell wrote, in 1984. “‘Who controls the past’ ran the Party slogan, ‘controls the future: who controls the present controls the past’.”

In the past, and not the very distant past, Jeremy Hunt voted to remain in the European Union. As health secretary when the vote took place, he was a crucial member of the Remain campaign. Whenever talk turned to the lie down the side of the Vote Leave bus, that voting Brexit would make £350m a week available to be spent on the NHS, Jeremy Hunt would appear on the television, the radio or the newspapers to make clear that Brexit would not deliver a dividend to the NHS. It was a risk to it that was not worth taking. “A vote to leave Europe will create economic uncertainty and that will mean less money for the health service,” were words he wrote in The Guardian in 2016, and echoed countless times elsewhere.

Now, however, he is manoeuvring for the leadership of his party, and “we” has quietly become “they.” Jeremy Hunt campaigned for Remain because he thought it was the correct course of action for his country. Now he slyly dissociates himself from a past that is clear for all to see. He speaks of the “them” because he is too cowardly to say “us”.

It is a depressing window into how this contest, whenever it might formally start, will be conducted. It is unfortunate for Boris Johnson that the party he seeks to lead has decided to declare very publicly that he is nothing less than a joke. Why else would Lord Digby Jones, a man appointed to the House of Lords in order to join Gordon Brown’s government, make a curious appearance on the main stage, in the conference’s opening moments, to brand Johnson an “offensive and irrelevant person” to muffled applause as Theresa May sat on her hands? Philip Hammond has told the Daily Mail “Boris will never be PM” and in the interview even did a daft impression of the bumbling former foreign secretary. In an interview with ITV, Robert Peston, who we can assume is not part of a Tory plot, openly laughed at the depth of Johnson’s ignorance of crucial trade issues, and went on laughing for some time.

But the last laugh may yet be on us. Boris Johnson may or may not have been taken out of the race, but the early signs are that said race will amount to little more than a Boris Johnson impersonation contest. Why else would Jeremy Hunt, foreign secretary, Remainer, businessman, Cameroonian voice of moderation, come out with the wild nonsense he did in his leadership pitch-turned conference speech?

The EU, he said was like the USSR. “The EU was set up to protect freedom. It was the Soviet Union that stopped people leaving,” he said. “The lesson from history is clear: if you turn the EU club into a prison, the desire to get out won’t diminish. It will grow and we won’t be the only prisoner that will want to escape.”

The “EUSSR” was a term once heard only on the wilder fringes of Ukip. The idea that the EU is a prison is palpable nonsense. The UK is leaving, of its own free will, and is upset that it will not get to hold on to many of the benefits of prison life. Meanwhile others, like Turkey, jump through hoops in the hope to secure incarceration.

And the “lesson of history” of which Hunt speaks could not be clearer. It says the precise opposite of his point. The UK is the only country ever to walk out the open door of the EU prison. Its doing so has made the stark and entirely voluntary consequences of doing so clear to see. Thanks to Britain, Euroscepticism is in decline all over the continent. The real lesson of history is that Jeremy Hunt will say whatever he thinks will appease the Tory right.

And that, really, is the real lesson here. We have already seen, just two years ago, the levels to which Tory MPs will gladly sink to prevent their own members having a say in who should lead them. Whether the mass membership, all 40,000 or so of them, really would vote for Boris Johnson if they were ever given the chance is not certain. But what is certain is that the MPs will do whatever is required never to find out.

It is breathtaking, really, that this tiny constituent of people, fundamentally mistrusted by their own party, should hold so much sway over the country. They are no more than the useless fat kid in the school playground to whom no one in their right mind would risk passing the football. Yet even without the ball, they dictate the play.

If so many of them were not the type of person so susceptible to the charms of Nigel Farage, David Cameron would have not had to reluctantly submit to a referendum as a matter of grim political necessity.

Now, at a time of national crisis they have inflicted, the likes of Jeremy Hunt, a Remainer, will gladly sacrifice his political convictions and his basic self-respect to please them.

How well they will react to the ever-increasing certainty that they will be denied for a second time the chance to vote Johnson is something of an unknown. How gladly will they make do with whatever Johnson tribute act is coming their way?

Boris Johnson is, to my mind, a shameless sociopath with nothing to offer his country but bluster. He has been found out. But he is also a staggering narcissist. It will not please him at all to see the party remaking itself in his image.

But the party knows it is the only way it can live without him. Where Jeremy Hunt leads, others will follow.