WHAT a week! As soon as it was clear the Prime Minister was resigning I told some of the younger SPADs to buckle up. Their souls would never face as many moral perils as those that lay in wait for them in the next few weeks.

A full-blooded Conservative Party leadership contest is an awesome and terrible sight to behold. It’s one of those rare times when we’re permitted to see all of the Seven Deadly Sins operating at the same time: Envy, Gluttony, Greed, Lust, Pride, Sloth, and Wrath.

This one, I feel, will be especially depraved. It seems that the PM’s three-year tenure plumbed such depths of moral turpitude that anything is now considered fair game.

Here, I must unburden myself of some seedy secrets as a means of shedding light on this vortex of vicissitude.

Throughout the course of the year the Whips Office dispenses little gifts and emoluments to MPs and staffers alike as a means of rewarding them for information: a pair of director’s box tickets to Stamford Bridge; a night at Glyndebourne; a Triple-A access night at Chablis O’Toole’s dungeon of punishment down by the Blues and Royal … that sort of thing.

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Others might call them bribes, but I prefer to deem them rewards for maintaining party discipline.

All the information goes into the whips’ Big Book Of Despair to enforce loyalty and good behaviour when assorted ingrates are tempted to vote the wrong way. I was once favoured with a peek inside its pages by a former whips staffer who had entertained high hopes of making merry with my cherry.

The malfeasances and iniquities that I glanced upon that day will stay with me until I breathe my last. I could hardly have supposed that human beings were capable of such conduct. Those pages described deeds that were as black as the Earl of Hell’s waistcoat.

Some of these incidents have now, it would appear, formed the basis of dirty dossiers compiled by friends and advisers of the main leadership contenders.

Almost as soon as Boris had made his little resignation speech I was approached by Rishi Sunak’s people to lend my assistance to his cause. They offered me a week in his cliff-top mansion in Florida if I could be persuaded to part with some information about ----- ------- and ----- -------- at last summer’s Spectator Party to mark the end of Covid restrictions.

“There were reports,” I told them, “of some shenanigans with a circus-troupe of dwarves which had been hired for the occasion. And there was that story about the two goats wearing pink bow ties wandering down The Strand at 4am looking subdued and bewildered and having to be apprehended by police. But nothing you could hang your hat on.”

Another dossier was given to me by “friends” of Liz Truss. It purported to be a catalogue of shameful deeds by all of her rivals for the leadership.

“You’re making a lot of this up,” I told them.

According to these people, Sunak is actually one of Lucifer’s right-hand commanders in human form and three witness reports put him at the scene of a witches’ Sabbath on Walpurgis Night which involved a human sacrifice.

There are what look like the title deeds of several properties on Mayfair linked to a Russian prostitution and modern slavery ring.

At the notorious Spectator spring equinox party in 2017 – where everyone had to come as their favourite Teletubby character – it seems that Laa-Laa, Po and Tinky Winky (and we all know their identities) were apprehended by police because of the white ribbons of cocaine that showed up like vapour-trails on the bright, luminous Teletubbies outfits. The official police report was suppressed for reasons of national security.

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And there’s a tape-recording of the following phone message circulating widely: “My Dearest Oleg, a propos those missile systems and those Brimstones and Mastiffs you requested toot sweet.

“The problem is that we’d promised a few of them to the Saudis in Yemen before it all kicked off in Ukraine and another consignment to the Somalians.

“However, I’m sure if we could do some business on the side by siphoning off a couple of them to those special buyers in Odesa, then we could give your lot priority over the Saudis.”

More than 20 pages in the dossier have references to Prince Andrew, along with a skull and crossbones symbol. This tells the reader that the information is so sensitive to National Security that it comes with an immediate Kill Order by MI5 and MI6.

I’m so sickened by the filth and squalor of this leadership contest that I resolve to phone Nicola at the earliest opportunity on the special number we agreed before I returned to London.

She needs to see some of this too.