In one of her many leadership campaign mis-steps Liz Truss promised that as Prime Minister she would “hit the ground”.
It took 44 days of political free-fall without a parachute but she appears finally to have achieved her ambition.
On her way down Truss, the shortest serving Prime Minister in British history, shredded the electoral credibility of the Conservative Party, damaged the economic standing of the UK internationally and left millions of households facing fast-rising mortgage bills and more political uncertainty than we have known since Brexit.
The running psychodrama of the Conservative Party, whether to pull up the drawbridge on Europe or to finally shake off the shackles of Empire, has left the self-proclaimed “most successful election winning machine in the world” a ship with a broken keel.
Truss, an adept convert to the cause, succeeded in winning the favour of the party by feeding venomous rivalries and the base instincts of Brexit-supporting Conservative members.
Although she proved to be a formidable campaigner she kept making mistakes from day one in office.
Instead of keeping her friends close and her enemies closer, she made the basic error of locking rivals out of government.
Allies like Therese Coffey and blind Brexiteers like Jacob Rees-Mogg were rewarded with a seat at the table. Heavyweights like Michael Gove and Rishi Sunak were left to brood, plot and quickly disrupt.
Not that Truss needed much help in wounding herself with tax cuts for the richest in the land and no assurances on benefits or for pensioners.
The death of the late Queen knocked Truss off course and when she came back after the national mourning the awkward Prime Minister was already on the back foot.
A mini-budget two weeks into the job demolished her premiership and laid the ground for Thursday’s inevitable downfall.
But if you thought the last six weeks were bad, just wait for the next seven days of early season pantomime. The famous “short sword fighting” of Scottish politics will be nothing compared to the bloodshed in Westminster’s version of Game of Thrones next week.
Liz Truss’s political funeral was a short, unsentimental affair. By dawn we will have the long-list of runners and riders to replace her. Can any of them lead the ungovernable Tories and then govern the country too?
Sunak will find it hard to be crowned as a unity candidate if the stale grassroot members, and Brexiteer buccaneers like Suella Braverman, have anything to do with it.
The prospect of the political outlaw Boris Johnson running may quicken the heart of Tory backwoodsmen, but that is a really Freddy Krueger re-run before Halloween.
Fined by the police for partying while people died in Covid wards, and still being investigated for misleading parliament, it would be incredible if Johnson stood again.
It would provoke outrage if he won.
But at least the certainty of defeating him in the subsequent General Election would, for the Labour party, be like shooting an elephant instead of shooting fish in a barrel.
Remember Johnson, before he was drummed out of Downing Street for protecting an alleged sex predator in his government, spectacularly lost two by-elections, in the northern Red Wall and the Southern blue one.
Any stardust he has left is best saved for sprinkling on a Santa Claus outfit on the political Christmas party circuit.
How fares Scotland in all this?
The snap general election Nicola Sturgeon demands to end this “utter shambles” of a government might not mesh well with trying to build momentum for her de-facto independence referendum.
That’s particularly true if Labour’s Anas Sarwar frames it as a change campaign, an election which is not about who we are and more about who we are for.
Left in the hands of the 0.3 per cent of the population who are members of the Tory party the process of selecting a new Prime Minister will look, for a second time, frankly weird.
From outside the UK, let’s face it from anywhere outside the W1 postcode, it looks like a travesty of democracy that the party can choose another Prime Minister for the whole of the UK without a general election.
The world looks on aghast at the mother of parliaments, wondering what this political vaudeville means for their own democracies which are always said to be so much less robust.
A 1922 committee fix for a leader next Friday, with or without the members blessing, will leave whoever wins looking like the cardboard cut-out of a Prime Minister – short of credibility, short of public sympathy and short of a mandate. It will be very hard to sustain or remain in office for long.
When she finally hit the ground on Thursday afternoon, Liz Truss set the political sat nav on all roads in the UK in just one direction, and that is a General Election.
Torcuil Crichton is a Scottish journalist based at Westminster.
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