Sketch: Watermelon Grayling an explosive hit on Facebook Live

With 23 terrifyingly long days and nights still to go, it was through sheer desperation to find something – anything – original to say, and absolutely nothing to do with an unlikely May typhoon blowing up Whitehall, that your humble sketch writer chose not to make the short stroll to Vote Leave HQ for a 27th time, and instead enjoyed the thrills of Chris Grayling’s speech through the invigorating prism of "Facebook Live".

(As an aside, today by the way, is exactly 10 days after Jeremy Corbyn’s Brexit-advocating weatherman brother Piers predicted “the hottest summer in 100 years” to start “in 10 days time”. It began instead with the Met Office issuing a severe weather warning.)

Facebook Live, which lets you broadcast live on Facebook, is new-ish. Its potential is vast, but it is of particular use to anyone not deemed interesting enough for the 24-hour news channels to carry, of which Her Majesty's Lord President of the Privy Council and dedicated Homer Simpson look-and-think-alike Chris Grayling is certainly one.

Media outlets and politicians have for months been trying to replicate the success of Buzzfeed’s recent Facebook Live stunt, which pulled in an online audience of over a million to count how many elastic bands you can stretch round a watermelon before it explodes (686). So there was an understandable frisson of excitement when the round, smooth shape of the former Justice Secretary’s head appeared on screen (686 to beat).

For those who’ve had the pleasure of seeing Mr Grayling speak in the flesh, the Facebook Live experience was uncannily lifelike. For long periods, he remained entirely motionless, with no discernible sound emerging. Every so often, a small disc would appear in the centre of his frozen forehead and slowly rotate, as if desperately trying to reignite a forgotten clockwork radio that’s been left on too long in the corner of a room.

Occasionally it would stutter briefly into life and spit out some curious phrase. “Southern Europe”; “Life of Riley”; “Gentleman at the back in the raincoat”; "Big influx of people"; "A small builder in my constituency”.

Though nothing that could be described as sense emerged, cartoon hearts nonetheless floated dreamily past his glabrescent form as the Vote Leave Facebook faithful "Liked" away. At one point, almost 3,000 people were watching.

But whatever pearls of Grayling wisdom they were denied as the feed stumbled and stuttered were more than made up for by the user comments that flashed continuously along the bottom.

“This country is what our forefathers fort for! And they want us to just hand it over?” said one. (20 Likes)

“This is about the secret European club of a Franco-German control of a gravy train!”

“Rothschild will take over n we will all die”

“We shall not walk quietly to our graves as you kill us piece by piece.”

“This is about one word – freedom to choose.”

“OUT OUT OUT OUT OUT OUT OUT OUT OUT and never coming back.”

A couple of contributors are worthy of special mention. "I can’t believe there are only 2.8K viewers of this live chat!” raged Andrea Clements of Potters Bar. “It’s half-term. Some people are at home with their kids or on holiday. Why aren’t they watching this?!!”

It’s one of life’s great mysteries. Half-term. A rainy day. And yet only 0.004 per cent of the population are watching Chris Grayling live on Facebook.

“This guy is great” said another, whose profile picture is a self-photoshopped triptych devoted to Ukip, Vote Leave and Donald Trump, and who lists his employment history as a "former cashier at Asda". (Whoever said expert opinion was all on one side). He carried on: “This guy should speak a lot more if he did Brexit will win with one hell of a landslide.”

Ah, hope. Audacious thing, isn't it.