It started with dark comedy. The sight of Rishi Sunak, behind the podium at No 10, drenched by the rain – a drowned rat in a sharp suit, drowned out by a hostile loudspeaker, bellowing out the fact of his sudden-death election – belonged to vaudeville.

The race itself belonged to Hobbes: “poor, nasty, brutish and short”.

And at the end, after all the speeches, the televised debates, the photo ops, the accusations, the helicopter rides, the leaflet-filled vehicles crisscrossing the country, the vox pops, what did we learn about our country and our politics?

We learned more about the foolish recklessness of those who have ruled us. Sunak called his election for himself and for his party and for his faction. There was nothing further from his mind, as he dripped rainwater, than the good of the nation or our democracy. He had no plan, other than to parrot the inanity that “the plan” was working. Tell that to the food bank volunteers or the coastguard at Dover.

He sought endorsement from a bemused electorate on the basis that he would accomplish fanciful things that he and the gallery of frauds and flops who preceded him had palpably failed to achieve. There would be levelling up – with 30 towns receiving £20m each. Levelling up, the great Tory chimera bequeathed by Boris Johnson, as elusive to that parsimonious........

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