In my admittedly sketchy understanding of it, black holes are formed when something becomes so massive that it collapses in on itself (am I getting this right, Carlo?) … and then keeps collapsing, over and over again, until it becomes infinitely tiny and inside-out and even the rules of physics cease to apply. This applies to supermassive celestial bodies, but also to supermassive shambles, such as we are to observe through our telescopes when we point them in the direction of the Conservative Party. Every zeptosecond brings a further wrinkle in political spacetime, and every zeptosecond sees the governing party, like a black hole, sucking harder than Newtonian physics ever thought possible. Take this latest reshuffle.

For days, the story tickled the headlines, would Rishi Sunak give Braverman the heave-ho, and appear weak and ineffectual? Or would he to let her stay, and appear, um, weak and ineffectual?

Which of these two things would stir up a smaller hornets’ nest of backbench disgruntlement? Which decision would cause him to lose next year’s general election marginally less catastrophically? And how would it affect the calculus, he’ll have been wondering, of who will lead the remaining smithereens of the party into their long and bleak period of opposition?

Former prime minister Liz Truss is now, what, basically a blogger? She’s not even the opposition

Sunak agonised over all of that and decided to sack Braverman and bring in David Cameron (for no obvious reason other than, in making Cameron a new Cincinnatus, he’ll infuriate Boris Johnson, who still fancies himself as the Classical comeback kid). Another twinkle on the event horizon.

After the thrill of this morning’s SW1 mini-drama subsides, there’s another conundrum in the pipe. This week the Conservatives will all be asked to vote – and, help!, nobody’s allowed to keep their head down and abstain because it’s an amendment to the King’s Speech – on a proposal to introduce a ‘fiscal lock’. The idea of this fiscal lock is that if any future government decides to go a bit off-piste with a budget, they won’t be allowed to quietly deep-six all the memos the Office for Budget Responsibility sends them beforehand saying ‘are you MAD?’

Put in parliamentary language, that comes out as: ‘Give the Office for Budget Responsibility the power to produce and publish forecasts for any government fiscal event which includes permanent tax and spending decisions over a threshold to be specified in a new Charter of Budget Responsibility’. As few will need to be reminded, the inciting incident for this one is the then chancellor Kwasi Kwarteng deciding not, after all, to publish the OBR’s doomy assessment of his mini-budget before he delivered it and crashed the economy.

Sounds good, right? Conservatives: all about fiscal responsibility, transparency and that sort of stuff. Regrettable, that business with the mini-budget: we’ve learned from that, right? And the OBR: that was a George Osborne invention, and he’s one of us, right? Except, argh, it’s a trap. The amendment has been tabled by the Labour party. So what are they to do? Heads, you look like you’re letting the Labour party change the sheets on the bed your party fouled; tails, you look like you’re in favour of letting the next demented Kwarteng/Truss combo that comes along do the same thing over again.

Meanwhile, for extra giggles, on the same day that these poor, soon-to-be-out-of-a-job backbenchers are going to be huddled in the division lobbies, nursing ice-pick migraines behind the eyes, the very Liz Truss who led them to this pass is going to be delivering her own ‘alternative budget’. A think-tank she has set up called the Growth Commission has promised to present a challenging, ‘exciting’, mavericky, outside-the-box report defying ‘conventional thinking’ to argue for the sort of low-tax, low-regulation radicalism that did such a good job of unleashing our animal spirits when Truss tried it while she was in power.

The difference this time being, obviously, she’s not in power. So the former prime minister is now, what, basically a blogger? She’s not even the opposition. We might remember that when Channel Four started the semi-wearisome tradition of screening an ‘alternative Queen’s Speech’ from Quentin Crisp, or Ali G, or Timmy Mallett or whoever, it at least knowingly did it for laughs. If this alternative budget will have any effect at all (and of course we can be grateful for this if nothing else) it will be to embarrass and annoy Rishi Sunak and Jeremy Hunt by showing just how divided and ungovernable their party is. But fair play to her: their actual proper budget won’t carry all that much more weight in the long run than a press-release from an ex-PM’s baby think-tank.

We have entered, in other words, the irrelevant recriminations phase of a dying government. Everyone who has served in a Tory cabinet in the last decade or so is, whether they like it or not, now in the equivalent of one of those Three Stooges routines where they’re all frantically jabbing their thumbs in each-other’s eyes to the accompaniment of air-horns and whoopee cushions. Perfect time, then, for that femme unserieuse Nadine Dorries to release a book in which she reveals that the party’s current malaise is the work of a sinister deep-state cabal involving everyone who isn’t her or Boris, headed by a mysterious ‘Dr No’ who gets his kicks nailing dead bunny-rabbits to people’s doors.

Very normal, very normal. Nothing to see here. Everything’s eye-gouging and gossip, and inasmuch as there’s any substance to it other than revenge (if I’m getting sucked into the black hole, by God I’m hanging onto your ankle as I go) it’s about who’s going to be the next leader. Yet every indication is that the new Tory leader who is going to matter even slightly to the course of history is currently taking his or her GCSEs; and will be far too busy trying not to get splatted by a chunk of RAAC concrete to pay enough attention to remember the names of any of this lot by the time he or she makes the front bench.

I’d like to have something solemn with which to conclude these observations, but the classic quotation that springs to mind is from Kipling’s Stalky & Co: ‘Ti-ra-la-la-i-tu! I gloat! Hear me!’ Black holes are a miracle of nature, and the further away they are the better off everyone is.