By the time she reached the lectern, Dame Andrea was panting hard

On a day of dizzying politics, nothing quite topped Dame Andrea Jenkyns’s arrival on stage at Reform’s party conference.

Dame Andrea, 51, was encased in a purple sequin jumpsuit and entered before lunch to the thump of rock music. She was singing (to use the verb in its loosest term) a song she had written in her youth.

‘I’m an insomniac!’ she caterwauled, teetering on high heels. ‘I’m an insomniac!’

By the time she reached the lectern Dame Andrea, who is Mayor of Greater Lincolnshire, was panting hard, possibly in need of a nebuliser. The good activists of Reform, who have heard most things in their life, were diving for cover.

This conference in Birmingham was about to start when news broke that Angela Rayner had snuffed it. Moments later we heard the poor Duchess of Kent had died. A Reform chap near me in Block Two, upper deck, was unchuffed.