David Cameron's last day of term: this swift and brutal political thriller reaches its (anti-)climax

David Cameron talks to pupils at Reach Academy in Feltham, west London (PA)

The removal van at the back entrance to Downing Street is often described as the grim reaper of British politics. In fact it is the undertaker. By the time they come for your possessions, your hopes and dreams are already long gone.

It was a blue one today, first spotted at noon, with a chap in a “Speedy Removals” T-shirt, walking past the security cordon. One has to imagine it was the speediest they’ve ever done. On Monday, the Camerons weren’t going anywhere until September. Now, by Wednesday night they’ll be homeless. Their house in West Kensington is rented out. They have a place in Oxfordshire, but it’s a long way from the kids’ school.

In the morning David Cameron’s final Cabinet meeting came and went. Ordinary-looking men and women were walking in steady pace up a not-at-all ordinary British street, and in and out through a grand front door – that familiar scene that always marks a shift in the tectonic plates of power.

No two iterations are ever quite the same, but there has never been one remotely like this. When Number 10 receives new tenants, it is in the wake of victory and defeat. Be it via ballot box or coordinated coup, a loser departs and a winner arrives. Cameron lost his own gamble, but it has destroyed all those who would claim to have been his conquerors too. The meeting lasted 50 minutes. There was a lot of banging on tables. But once George Osborne and Theresa May had offered a few kind words, the Prime Minister put an end to the tributes. Michael Gove, once a close friend and godfather to Cameron’s deceased son Ivan, was not permitted to speak. They banged on the table at the end. Jeremy Hunt, Anna Soubry and one or two others stopped for a chat with the TV crews. Hunt thanked him “for everything he has done for the country”. Gay marriage. Free schools. Having to fix the roof while no sun shone. But such things will not weigh a feather in the balance, not in history’s first draft or its last.

It took Theresa May several minutes to get out of the door and into her waiting car. First she went the wrong way and tried to get in the wrong car, then the photographers talked her into remounting the steps for a picture on the Number 10 doorstep. She was driven the very short distance to Parliament with a far larger team of police outriders than is usual. How quickly the trappings of high office are transferred. It was only a preview, of course. In our weary democracy, the increasing dysfunctions of which have never been more exposed than in the past few weeks, it is all but impossible for a Prime Minister step down unless the Queen (or King) is at home at the palace. On Tuesday the monarch was in Norfolk, so the formalities must wait.

It has been brutal but it has certainly been swift. A single explosive episode of political thriller. Meanwhile, Labour’s hideous box set drags for hour after stultifying hour, with neither character nor action.

Across town, Jeremy Corbyn fought his way through the usual throng and into a meeting of Labour’s National Executive Committee, who were meeting to try and work out their own rules on whether a leader who is subject to a leadership challenge must be included by default in the resulting election. But if Corbyn goes and the credits roll, Labour will soon find out there are a load more episodes to come, and life without their anti-hero is scarcely any less pointless.

It is now a week since Sir John Chilcot’s thunderbolt cameo amid the unending madness. The Blair government should have foreseen the horrors that would follow the toppling of a tyrant. “We do not agree that hindsight is required,” he said.

To see that Labour’s many intractable problems, from Scotland to Ukip to its sheer lack of leaders, will not be cured by the toppling of the party’s own uncharismatic dictator does not require hindsight either.