Lord Frost is very prominent these days, isn’t he?
The man responsible for negotiating Brexit, who later quit because he didn’t think the government was Tory enough, seems to be everywhere.
Yesterday he delivered a speech about how Brexit was a roaring success.
Sticking with the far-fetched theme, this morning he opined that last night’s by-election results were “not particularly good” for Labour and the Lib Dems.
Yes, you read that correctly. The two by-elections - which saw the Tories comfortably lose to Labour in Wakefield and be humiliated by the Lib Dems in Tiverton and Honiton - were actually underwhelming for the victors.
Try telling that to Lib Dem leader Ed Davey and his new MP Richard Foord, who celebrated their result by declaring it was “time to show Boris the door” by, er, standing next to a door.
To be fair, Lord Frost concede that the results were also “terrible” for his own party.
But he said an analysis of the results showed that the combined Lab/Lib vote share only went up marginally in Devon and actually fell in west Yorkshire.
The real story of the night, he insisted, was that traditional Tory voters opted to stay at home. “We as Conservatives must decide why that is, and what we do about it,” he added, in a less-than-subtle hint that it may well be time to give Johnson the heave-ho.
Of course, Lord Frost wasn’t the only Tory trying to rain on the Labour and Lib Dem parades.
The heroic spin coming out of CCHQ was that history shows that Tory governments lose by-elections but then go on to win the subsequent by-elections.
Even the resignation of party chairman Oliver Dowden failed to persuade them that things in the Conservative garden are far from rosey.
But what that thesis fails to acknowledge is that after 1992, the Tories lost no fewer than eight by-elections before going on to lose by a landslide to Tony Blair’s New Labour in 1997.
It also ignores the fact that in Tiverton and Honiton, the Lib Dems came from 27,000 votes behind the Tories in 2019 to win by more than 6,000.
And while Labour’s performance in Wakefield didn’t trouble the political Richter scale, if they repeated it across the country, it would be enough to send Keir Starmer into Number 10.
Senior Conservatives have an awful lot of thinking to do over the coming weekend. It would help if they started by dealing in reality, rather than fantasy.