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One thing’s for sure. This is no dawn of the gods.

The great blue wave has crashed onto stony shores. The arrogant idle rich and the idolaters of the blond buffoon have been shown up very publicly for what they are. This is starting to look like the British Conservative Party’s Ragnarök.

Their only modest consolation has come in the form of a minor grey renaissance – in the form of former Prime Ministers John Major and Theresa May, who certainly attracted some admiration last week.

Mr. Major’s predictions as to the dire economic consequences of Brexit and the rise of Boris Johnson have been trending on Twitter in footage resurrected from years back. The latter, meanwhile, acquitted herself well in last week’s House of Commons debate as to the fate of her notorious successor, supporting the recommendations of the report into his conduct as part of a process necessary “to restore faith in our parliamentary democracy”.

In the end, 354 MPs (including 118 Tories) voted in favor of the damning findings, with only seven diehard Johnson loyalists opposing it.

The current Prime Minister was one of 225 members who either abstained or avoided parliament that evening.

Boris Johnson had himself suggested that his supporters should stay away, doubtless in a bid to mitigate his humiliation: so that he might in future maintain that those who didn’t vote would have cast their ballots in his favor, if he hadn’t nobly fallen on his sword and asked them not to.

That would of course be typically misleading. Those who didn’t vote may have wished to avoid alienating any constituents still loyal to Mr. Johnson, or simply – like Rishi Sunak himself – to avoid stoking any further controversy within their own party.

But it’s a strategy which may well backfire, with a recent poll showing 85 per cent of the British public believing Johnson to be a liar, and with his most ardent disciples openly threatening Tory civil war.

And, by avoiding the fray, Mr. Sunak has made himself appear weak in the eyes of opponents both outside and within his own party.

Boris Johnson has now been stripped of his right to a parliamentary pass, and a further inquiry will be held to investigate the tactics of bullying and intimidation whereby some of his more zealous colleagues attempted to subvert the work of the original inquiry committee.

But that won’t be the end of it. Also last week, video footage emerged showing Conservative Party activists partying unlawfully through lockdown. The Christmas party in question included two recipients of the awards and peerages that Mr. Johnson had generously doled out to his supporters two weeks earlier.

(He also used his resignation honors list to elevate to the House of Lords a young lady of his acquaintance – a woman just twenty-nine years old – in a move which has prompted a combination of moral outrage and sniggering prurience.)

A copy of the invitation to that “jingle and mingle” event was also last week leaked to the media. Questions are now being asked as to whether the Metropolitan Police took appropriate action at the time in response to this evidently premeditated lawlessness.

Meanwhile, the shameless old blusterer acted with typical mercenary self-interest when, in the immediate wake of his resignation from the Commons, he accepted what one can only imagine to have been a ludicrously lucrative deal to become a regular columnist for the Daily Mail newspaper.

In doing so, and by failing to give appropriate notice to the government’s Advisory Committee on Business Appointments, he also breached the ministerial code – though he clearly didn’t even pretend to care anymore about such things.

Last week also wasn’t great for a couple of other former Conservative premiers.

The same day as Boris Johnson’s parliamentary drubbing, David Cameron admitted to having made mistakes, under questioning at the public inquiry into the handling of the pandemic crisis, and was faced with suggestions that his spending cuts while in office had left the country desperately unprepared for the onset of Covid-19. The shiny-faced man-child, a shameless product of idleness and privilege, hardly came out of the day smelling of roses.

At the same time, his lazy-thinking successor Liz Truss, the nemesis of experts and of common sense, once more provoked general ridicule, after having complained that a tabloid newspaper's predictions that her time in Downing Street would last less time than a lettuce had been unfunny and puerile.

The leader who’d wrecked the British economy in the course of the nation’s shortest-ever premiership looked even more out of touch than ever before – out of touch with the public mood, and indeed out of touch with reality itself.

None of this is good news for the Tories. Their saga of disasters rumbles on, as their reputation for honesty and integrity, such as it ever was, lies tattered and torn at the feet of a series of careless, reckless and incompetent leaders.

The battered Conservative Party now faces the unwelcome prospect of at least four by-elections over the course of the summer and into the autumn. The scruffy ruffian who led them to a landslide victory less than four years ago is both down and out. It seems that even big bad Boris can’t blag his way out of this one.

But let’s not jump to hasty conclusions. Eighteen months – the period expected till the UK’s next general election – is a very long time in politics.

The true-blue campaign machine might not entirely have run out of tricks – nor indeed out of friends in the right-wing press. There may be life in the old dog yet.