Sketch: Stephen Kerr's inconvenient tooth

Someone has put a curse on the Scottish Tories.

Douglas Ross losing his voice on the eve of conference could have been put down to pure rotten luck. Politicians aren’t indestructible, sometimes they succumb to illness, even those that seem more robot than human – just ask Theresa May.

And so, Ross had to spend most of Thursday not saying a word, not even able to enjoy his favourite pastime of riling up Nicola Sturgeon at FMQs. A spokesperson confirmed Ross would deliver a “slightly shortened version of his keynote address” at conference. Though on reflection, maybe that had more to do with making Rishi Sunak’s two minute, sixteen second video seem less short in comparison.

Then in a second blow to the party, Oliver Mundell – who had been due to make a major announcement on education policy – was struck down with Covid. Or maybe he just said he had Covid because he didn’t want to get caught by the not-so-friendly fire between Ross and Boris Johnson. Mundell had, of course, remained decidedly silent over partygate and whether he backed Ross’s calls for the Big Dog to be given the boot.

And then things really started to go wrong. Chief whip Stephen Kerr, who was standing in for Mundell, got up on stage and immediately started sticking his thumb in his mouth. Was it a nervous tick or could he not find his comfort blanky or see his mummy? But no, he kept doing it while the conference crowd watched on, confused.

“I am having a problem with my teeth,” he offered by way of an explanation that didn’t really do much to alleviate the sense of puzzlement enveloping the room.

Addressing the problem didn’t make it go away, either. The chief whip was unable to keep his own pearly whites in line and one crown tumbled to the floor. This was his “Theresa May moment,” he joked. The Tory attack dog is, it seems, all bark and no bite.

If you learn nothing else from the education debate, he told delegates, it’s the importance of properly gluing down your crowns. Or at least don’t sit in the front row when sexagenarians are on stage. Probably not the message the party wanted to send.

Anyway, one bout of bad luck is unfortunate, two a coincidence, but three? It seems so unlikely. The question is, who cursed the Conservatives?

Perhaps it was Boris Johnson. The party is certainly no stranger to infighting, Johnson especially. Maybe he wanted revenge for Ross calling for his resignation. His closest allies don’t seem to like strangers to the Dark Arts either. Priti Patel has the smirk of a trickster god, trading favours for souls. Nadine Dorries must have sworn on a monkey’s paw to become culture secretary despite the fact she’s written more books than she’s read. And Jacob Rees-Mogg is positively Lovecraftian.

But this is all giving BoJo the Clown a bit too much credit. Maybe having a senior Tory embarrass himself on stage was part of the bargain to have him at conference. Cancel the 1922 letter, prostrate yourselves, and maybe I’ll accept your invite, he might have told them. What better way to show how toothless his colleagues north of the border were than actually, literally, losing their teeth?

Whatever the details, the price must have been paid because Ross miraculously got his voice back just in time to introduce the PM.

And in his own address on Saturday, Ross warned of someone else’s witchcraft: the nationalists are shrinking Scotland, apparently. “Scotland is becoming a smaller country every day that the SNP remain in power,” he warned delegates.

Unbeknownst to voters, Nicola Sturgeon has a shrink-ray trained on Scotland and is reducing the country by an inch or so every year she’s in power. If she can’t have Scotland, no one else can.

But then, the alternative to a shrinking Scotland under the Nats is a UK leaving Earth under the Tories – at least according to the Scottish Greens. Co-leader Lorna Slater told her own party’s conference she wants to live in “a Scotland that joins the world rather than one that abandons it”.

You heard it here first. The UK Government’s post-Brexit plan is to blast the entire country off into space. Colonising Mars would be one way to take back control. It would certainly reduce the number of refugees coming to the UK, though I imagine it would be harder to push spaceships back into the sky than boats back into the Channel.

And just like the Home Office hailed the launch of the Ukraine Family Scheme as the “first visa scheme in the world” since Russia’s invasion, the UK could be the first in the world to house refugees in outer space. Who cares about the freezing temperatures, the lack of oxygen, the red dust storms? The Home Office loves a hostile environment, after all.