There’s an episode of the US medical sitcom Scrubs, in which the hospital is under threat of a lawsuit from the relative of a patient.

Chief of Medicine Dr Kelso tells the man: “I personally see to it that every inch of this building is up to the highest standards and codes.”

Unfortunately, due to a complicated B-plot, the hospital’s janitor has just accidentally unleashed a bag of rats, the rodents scurrying over the shoes of the concerned relative.

“Well,” Kelso sighs. “That’s just bad timing.”

One might imagine new Scottish Conservative leader Russell Findlay, who this week had to deny his MSPs were fighting like, yes, "rats in a sack", is suffering from similar exasperation as he watches his party’s conference unfold in Manchester.

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Before and after his election, Mr Findlay has done his best to position himself as serious and sensible. He’s binned the party’s constitution spokesperson role because he doesn’t want to engage in “pointless SNP or Green debates on independence”. He’s pledged to focus on “bread and butter” issues which matter to voters. He’s standing up against the “the divisiveness and fringe obsessions”, including from his own party, which don’t matter to every day lives.

Then he looks south and Liz Truss is blaming everyone but herself for bringing down her premiership, Kemi Badenoch is messing about with triangles and saying women shouldn’t get maternity pay and Robert Jenrick is saying UK special forces shoot to kill in case human rights laws let terrorists out of jail early. That’s before we even get to Boris Johnson saying the Chinese developed Covid in a lab “like the witches in Macbeth”, a theory which has been discredited “beyond a reasonable doubt”.

This would be the political equivalent of releasing a bag of rats at the worst possible moment.

New polling from Ipsos sought to find out why so many Conservative voters abandoned the party in the summer, and it’s perhaps not a surprise that around a quarter of those who voted for other parties went to Reform.

However, one in five voted for Labour (12%), the Lib Dems (7%) or even the Greens (2%) rather than the Tories, with change, stability and competence key factors cited in moving to Sir Keir Starmer’s party.

The new Prime Minister may have parked the bus and bored his way to Number 10 but he clearly offers, in the way that David Cameron did, the sense of just being “the kind of guy” who should be Prime Minister.

Mr Findlay is clearly looking to dissociate himself from those seeking a moonhowling contest with Nigel Farage, but that’s no easy task when former Prime Ministers and current leadership hopefuls keep reminding everyone of why they unceremoniously booted the Tories out in the first place.

It’s all well and good trying to keep to “bread and butter” politics but that message is unlikely to cut through while Mr Johnson is talking about invading the Netherlands to requisition Covid vaccines and Robert Jenrick is declaring the sensible thing to do in the Middle East would be to move the UK’s Israeli embassy to Jerusalem.

That’s just bad timing.