Watching Alexander Johnson's interventions on Brexit is like being in a closed compartment of a train with a two-year-old having a tantrum, the parents hopelessly incapable and unable to control their child.

In fact, we'd be better off if he was a child. At least then there would be an end to it, which is more than one can say for Johnson and the stupidity than only a very expensive education can buy.

A more sensible person would be conscious that, in setting his entirely arbitrary "red lines" for the so-called "transition period", Johnson was contradicting the basic requirements already set by the European Council and therefore seeking things which simply cannot be delivered.

In pulling his stunt just before the Conservative Party conference, though, he does more than challenge the EU negotiators. He is directly confronting the Prime Minister – his boss – and party leader, making her job inestimably more difficult.

Already weakened by her unsuccessful general election campaign and then by her inability to put the Brexit talks to bed – despite the much-hyped Florence speech – Mrs May is now being gravely undermined by her own Foreign Secretary.

From this, there can only be two outcomes. Either Mrs May fires Johnson, or she doesn't. Either way, she will probably end up with a leadership campaign on her hands. But if she doesn't fire the man, she comes away looking even weaker than she does already.

It wouldn't be so bad if Johnson was on the ball, addressing the problematical Phase One issues that are blocking the negotiations. But he's moved straight into the "transition period", insisting that it should last "not a second more" than two years, without looking at the current situation.

He's thus rather missing the essential point – that we're not going to get near an agreement on the transition until there has been "sufficient progress" in Phase One. And, as M. Juncker so helpfully informed us at Tallinn, we're a very long way from that point.

Even then, with Mrs May calling it an "implementation period", we're not even working from the same dictionary, while no one is actually setting out what this mystical period involves, and how it is to be brought about.

The "colleagues" are talking glibly about a temporary extension of the acquis on which basis it is entirely logical that they should require that "existing Union regulatory, budgetary, supervisory, judiciary and enforcement instruments and structures" should apply.

Should we even get as far as discussing a transition period, then we are faced with Johnson's insistence that the UK must refuse to accept any new EU rules or ECJ rulings during the period. That, to put it mildly, is a deal breaker. We don't get past this.

Johnson's third point (of four) is that the prime minister should rule out further payments to Brussels "for single market access" when the transition ends. He doesn't make it clear whether he's ruling out paying the RAL but, if he is, then again we're going nowhere.

As for his last point, this is the tedious absurdity of his demanding that the final deal must not result in the UK copying Brussels rules to ensure easy access to the single market. But this is from a man who thinks the "Banana Directive" was invented by Brussels – a man whose grasp of regulatory issues would not carry him past nursery school.

But the real agenda is, of course, less to do with the negotiations than it is Johnson positioning himself for the expected Tory leadership contest as the increasingly lame-duck May fails to exert her grip on the Party.

On that, we have the observations of Matthew Parris who has it that the Tories are "trapped in a zombie apocalypse".

May's personal political death, he writes, "occurred on the pronouncement of the exit poll on election day. Reanimated the following morning, she's now a zombie prime minister leading a zombie cabinet in a zombie party gathering in Manchester for a conference of the walking dead".

Last year in Birmingham, she and her ministers strutted the stage with bold assertions of what we most definitely and absolutely wouldn't stand for any longer after Brexit: the European Court of Justice, "supranational institutions", immigration, huge payments to the EU.

Explaining the blurred vocabulary and the unwillingness to define terms, Parris goes on to say that the Tories are now in the middle of a covert, slow-motion retreat.

The Party, he says, dare not say this at their conference, but in the only amicable Brexit we can get from our EU partners, there would have to be quite a bit of ECJ, quite a bit of supranational organisations, quite a bit of immigration, and huge payments to Brussels.

Thus, he says, "this year in Manchester, fully six months after Article 50 was triggered and as it becomes ever more plain that we were by no means ready, Conservative ministers will be walking on eggs: hinting, prevaricating, nervously preparing the ground for the truth to emerge once the conference is over".

In the resultant division and confusion, he argues that, implicitly, the party has chosen Mrs May not to lead them. But sooner or later they will have to choose someone to lead them. And that is where the odious Alexander Johnson comes in.

Bluntly, if this sociopath ever gets near the premiership, he will destroy the Conservative Party, and probably take the nation down with it. One hopes against hope that the Party will have the sense to realise that this is not the man they want to trust with the UK's nuclear trigger.

Crucially, though, Johnson at the helm would inevitably result in a "no deal" Brexit, triggering an unmitigated disaster of epic proportions. It is sad to see how apparently sane people have fallen for the myth that working to WTO rules is a viable option, including my old friend Owen Paterson.

This goes to show that information is no antidote to stupidity – Mr Paterson has had all the information he ever needed to make a sensible choice yet, despite that, has allowed himself to be seduced by the dark side. He is now in a place from which there is no recovery.

At last, however, we are seeing the glimmerings of a backlash, with some of the "usual suspects" taking a stand. This includes Nicky Morgan, now chair of the Treasury Committee. She accuses Johnson of a "dereliction" of duty, warning that his endless currying of favour with hard line Brexiteers is leading Jeremy Corbyn to Downing Street and the Conservatives to "our undoing as a party".