The former minister’s political career began with comparisons to Thatcher and ended over Brexit. She opens up about her ex-colleagues, her infamous Nigel Farage impression, and her determination to help Sir Keir succeed

Cast your mind back to what was, even by recent standards, an especially weird and constipated period in British politics when the electorate had voted to leave the European Union but the politicians couldn’t agree on how to do it. For almost four years, from 2016 to 2020, the country was in agonising limbo, stuck somewhere between separation and divorce, as it became clear that Brexit was far more complex and intractable than a simple yes/no vote suggested.

While the nation grew increasingly more divided and embittered, one of the most vocal politicians calling for a second clarifying referendum was Anna Soubry, the former Conservative minister and, at the time, MP for Broxtowe in Nottinghamshire. She was telegenic, opinionated but also aiming to build a cross-party and popular consensus among those who believed they’d been sold a pup by the leave campaign.

Before the Conservatives were elected in 2010, David Cameron set out his vision of a prosperous, secure country that would care for all. On every metric, by every yardstick, his party has failed

Some neuroscientists describe it as Life Review. It’s the term they give to those slow-motion instants – after your car hits the black ice but before its impact with the oncoming juggernaut – in which TikTok clips of your whole past are played in front of your eyes. Some argue that the phenomenon is the result of a massive overdose of the flight or fight response, which triggers the brain’s darkest memories and defining emotions all at once. Others, fancifully, that it is evidence of the spirit packing its bags for the life hereafter.

You’d have to say that the sickening squeal of brakes that attends the impending car crash of the Conservative party lends weight to the first of those theories.

Each government has been a challenge, each leader sillier and more ruinous than the last. But even cartoonists crave a bit of boring earnestness sometimes

For the past five weeks people have repeatedly said to me, “You must be really busy!” I’ve had to explain that elections aren’t like that; in fact, from the point of view of cartoonists, they’re boring. The only real fun comes when the wheels fall off the party machines and their careful choreography collapses into farce. But in this election even the Tories’ serial weapons-grade balls-ups are becoming a bore, serving merely to remind me of the universal truth that reality will always, always be weirder than anything satire could think up in a million years.

That said, in the empty hours of this interminable death watch while we’ve waited for the Tory tumbril finally to trundle to the guillotine, I’ve been reflecting on the past 14 years, and how the worst government of my lifetime has been succeeded five times by one that was even worse.