So farewell then to the great realignment: Suella Braverman out of a great office of state and David Cameron back into one. As electoral signals go, this one hardly needs much decoding. The alliance of social conservatives that fell into the Tory lap without them really understanding why has been spurned. The boarding school boys are back in charge and the possibilities of the Conservative party embracing much conservatism is at an end.

Everything that has happened since 2016 has in effect been wiped in the Westminster equivalent of a Bobby Ewing shower scene. It just needs Cameron to stare at us quizzically as if puzzled at our collective double-take for us to understand that it was all just a dream.

A PM without a mandate of his own has extinguished the mandate and priorities upon which his party was elected with a stonking majority

The Tories will go back to battling for the Centrist Dad vote, which may help them hang on to a few more Blue Wall seats in the Home Counties. But the Red Wall will return to Labour on the back of mass abstentions or votes for the Reform party among those who backed Boris Johnson’s 2019 pitch.

A Prime Minister without a mandate of his own has in effect extinguished the mandate and priorities upon which his party was elected with a stonking majority. If the Supreme Court rules against the Rwanda plan on Wednesday then can anyone imagine Sunak, Cameron, James Cleverly and the rest pulling out of the European Convention on Human Rights? Hardly.

We are back to the land of stuffed suits, handshakes with G7 chinless wonders and eventual elevation to the House of Lords for those who have toed the establishment line.

Perhaps another realignment will now get underway, with the Braverman wing of the Conservatives entering into talks with Richard Tice’s Reform. Certainly many grassroots Tory members will be heading that way.

Once again the smart people in Downing Street have decided that the kind of gut conservatism which fuelled Brexit is a vulgar fringe activity that they should have nothing to do with. Instead, they will seek to sit in the ‘centre ground’ and expect social and cultural conservatives to fall in behind them on the basis of minuscule policy scraps, the projection of ‘competence’ (hollow laugh) and the fact that they are not the Labour party.

This reshuffle smells to me like a William Hague production – the Mark II version after his courage had been smashed out of him by the 2001 general election, of course. After all, Hague’s protégé prime minister has installed a former party leader as Foreign Secretary, just as Cameron did with Hague himself.

Sunak’s Conservative party will never bring down net immigration to the ‘tens of thousands’, never stop illegal immigration, never fight for the institution of the family, never expand the prison estate to accommodate everyone who deserves to reside within it, never make the best of Brexit opportunities for fear of upsetting Brussels and never properly resist the takeover of the public realm by the identitarian left.

In fact it has now rejected the new political paradigm offered by Brexit every bit as much as has Keir Starmer’s Labour party. Might this be the way to saving 250 seats and a potential return to power in 2028 after next year’s now inevitable defeat? I doubt that.

Nature abhors a vacuum and 2016 showed social and cultural conservatives how strong and numerous they really were. Something new will come about to offer them the political outlet they thought they had elected four years ago.