What larks eh? This column has on occasion suggested that the Tories couldn’t organise a piss up in a brewery. It now transpires that they can’t run a party conference in Birmingham either.

In the space of a week we’ve had more defections than an MI5/KGB exchange programme, plus spats, recriminations and the highly improper use of social media.

Recently the Tories have had more problems with what people are wearing than what they are not. Aiden Burley MP — he of the nazi-themed stag do— that means you.

So in a way it was reassuring to see a bit of good old-fashioned sleaze rearing its head, if you’ll excuse the pun and unfortunate mental image, with Brooks Newmark (crazy name, crazy guy) sending graphic pictures of himself to an undercover hack.

The hack in question posed as a party activist. Newmark posed in a rather different fashion…

Now, first things first. The reporter used a picture of a Scandinavian model to entice the hapless Newmark. That should have been a giveaway right there.

Have you ever seen Tory Party activists?

This column has and the only thing most of them could model would be a Stanna stair lift.

Spritely they are not.

Those who are young enough to be in the same age bracket as the model in question — both male and female — have, how to put this delicately, a touch of the equine about them.

Secondly, I know the Tories are somewhat fetishistic in their sexual predilections but Newmark is not exactly Brad Pitt, or even William Pitt.

In fact anyone unfortunate enough to receive a scantily clad image of him would be entitled to lodge a complaint under the obscene publications act and seek damages for mental cruelty.

A word of advice to our politicians, if you are sent racy emails/texts from a glamorous individual, it’s a sting or a sex-text scam.

They don’t call politics show business for ugly people for nothing.

But they weren’t done there. Fresh from the Newmark debacle we had the coup de grace delivered by the aptly named Mark Reckless MP who hilariously chose the days before party conference as the appropriate time to jump ship to Ukip.

The timing was the only surprising aspect of his announcement. Reckless has always been on the headbanger wing of the party — somewhere below Tebbit, Michael Howard and Chris Grayling in the psychopath rankings. IDS has a ranking all of his own.

The latest defection follows hot on the heels of that of another Tory MP, Douglas Carswell, last month.

Reckless said he was quitting the Tories as the leadership was “part of the problem that is holding this country back” adding that voters felt “ripped off and lied to.”

Yes, not least by you. And did it really take him this long to work out that robbing us and lying to us are the coalition’s only real policies?

But the rats kept on hurling themselves from the burning decks of the Tory ship. It has also emerged that former Tory donor Arron Banks has switched his substantial financial support to Farage and his motley crew. Banks was initially going to donate £100,000 to Ukip but then, showing the tact and diplomacy the Tories are legendary for, William Hague branded him a “nobody” and Banks decided to up it to a million instead.

Not so much a case of cutting off your nose to spite your face as discharging a double barrelled shotgun into your cranium at point blank range in a bid to kill a bothersome fly.

And this was the guy who ran the Foreign Office. It’s no wonder everyone hates us. Well, that and centuries of imperialism, colonialism and God-awful hymns.

There were some speeches as well apparently. I’m not sure what they were about because the only way to stomach it was to have the volume off. I seem to recall Boris Johnson brandishing a brick for some bizarre reason and Osborne looking even more unctuously smug than usual.

He even ripped off the monologue from Trainspotting, much to the chagrin of the book’s author Irvine Welsh. This was an unusual choice as the passage in question is a speech made by a Scottish junky and after the recent independence vote could be seen as somewhat ill-advised.

We were treated to the surreal sight of Theresa May prefacing her oration by bringing a young black man on stage who’d been stopped and searched by the cops over 20 times — and that was just trying to get into the conference.

That must have confused some of the old guard who probably wondered why he wasn’t in shackles or serving canapes.

And then it was time for the leader’s speech. Ed Miliband received much mockery, not least from Cameron, over his forgetting to mention the deficit in his note-free speech last week.

And perhaps Cameron got a bit cocky — it was all going so well and then he accidentally told the truth. Probably the first time that’s ever happened at a party political conference.

In an attempt at a rabble-rousing speech, Cameron predictably played the jingoist card to the hilt. He sought to evoke the spirit of D-Day even though it’s looking more like Dunkirk for the Tories…

And then it happened, in one of the more patronising sections of his speech he turned his attention to the plight of poor children in housing estates.

“These are the people we resent!” he bellowed.

Freud would have had a field day with this lot. Cassette Boy’s re-edit says it all.

Well, it’s been a week of musical chairs. Griffin being booted out of the BNP, two Tories and a donor defecting to Ukip and the rest of us still as fucked as we always were.