Goodbye Gavin Williamson, we should never have seen your like in the first place

For any event, the army stood ready, according to the outgoing defence secretary. Now it stands ready to jump for joy

And so, in the end, it was not Russia but Gavin Williamson himself that shut up and went away. Cut off from the heart of government, cut off as he once was by Richard Madeley in front of a semi-rampant elephant in a Midlands safari park. Out of the frying pan and, in the fullness of time, back to the fireplaces.

Oh Gavin, we will never see your like again. It is nothing short of a wonder that we ever saw your like in the first place. Never happier than when Instagramming pictures of the skips you had filled at the weekend, or the microwave popcorn you so enjoy while watching back episodes of Friends. And suddenly, there you were, in charge of the fifth largest armed forces in the world.

However did it happen? Well, technically how it happened was that it turned out that Theresa May’s safest pair of hands were not safe, but wandering. And so on your advice Michael Fallon was sacked, and also on your advice he was replaced – by you.

And the rest, as they say, has been short but spectacular history. What was the peak of Gavin Williamson’s high statesmanship? People will say it was the time, in the wake of the Salisbury nerve agent attacks, that as defence secretary he stood on a stage and told Russia to “shut up and go away”.

It would, however, be unfair to overlook the less remembered incident that happened later, such as when he threatened to send aircraft carriers into Chinese territory, a few days before the chancellor was scheduled to arrive there for trade talks that were promptly cancelled.

This, by the way, after he used the front pages of The Times newspaper to seek to have the chancellor blacklisted from Royal Air Force passenger planes until his bill was settled.

In any case, all of this is to rush past the classic kiss-and-tell exposé in the Daily Mail. A kiss-and-tell in the sense that he once kissed a work colleague, decades ago, and then told to the newspapers about it himself.

And then there has been the high drama of his final days. From the moment it became known that a vanishingly small number of potential cabinet ministers or their advisers had leaked information from a National Security Council briefing, and that one of those ministers could have been Gavin Williamson, a new dramatic form has emerged. Not so much a whodunnit, as a when-will-it-be-confirmed-Gavin-dunnit?

Try to imagine a BBC Christmas Agatha Christie, in which a former fireplace salesman from Stoke wanders in plain sight around the stately home, hands dripping blood, dead bodies piled high over each shoulder, and you might come close to understanding the kind of tension that has gripped the nation, as it waited for the probability of it having been Gavin Williamson all along to make that final leap from 99.99999999 per cent, all the way up to 100. Niche, perhaps, but it can’t be doubted there’s a market.

It had been said, when he got the job, that a man who is known only for keeping a pet tarantula on his desk may not quite be the substantial figure demanded of the role. But, in his defence, he has done more than enough over the last 21 magnificent months to leave a legacy almost like no other. Certainly, no one is talking about the tarantula now.

No news event was too big or small for Gavin Williamson to offer up the military to step in and sort it out. The army “stands ready” to tackle knife crime. The army “stands ready” to sort out a no-deal Brexit. The army “stands ready” to collect the tax on cans of fizzy drink. The army “stands ready” to roll out universal credit and drive driverless cars on British roads by the end of 2021. And now, the army stands ready for a new defence secretary. The army stands ready, one suspects, to jump for joy.

Indeed, it may even be that the high arc of the Gavin Williamson narrative has not yet even bent towards its conclusion. For Gavin has not shut up. Gavin has not gone away. Rather he has, this 42-year-old schoolboy, told Sky News that he “swears on his children’s lives” that he is not the leaker. There has been an “exchange of letters”. Oh, the dignity of it all.

Nothing became his political life. Not even the leaving of it.