“To the country, I would like to say, first and foremost, I am sorry.” Finally, when it was too late to make a difference, as he left Downing Street for the last time, Rishi Sunak was saying what he should have said when he walked into the place a year and a half ago. It is hard to imagine there was much he could have done to stop his party losing this election, but his past evasions about his party’s record in government surely didn’t help matters.

“I have heard your anger, your disappointment,” he went on, “and I take responsibility for this loss.” This was rather generous to the rest of his party. Although Conservative MPs may struggle to acknowledge it, Thursday’s result was very much a team effort. It takes five prime ministers and an awful lot of WhatsApp groups to deliver a result like this.

The Tories, Sunak said, would take up their “crucial role in opposition professionally and effectively”. If only they’d taken this approach to the no-less-crucial role of government, they might not have been in this mess.

It can only be days before we’re assured that the Conservatives have a narrow path to victory in 2029

Then it was on to his achievements, such as they were. He’d manage to “return stability to our economy” while “rebuilding relations with allies”, and restoring devolution to Northern Ireland. “I believe this country is safer, stronger and more secure than it was 20 months ago,” he said. That’s right, he was asking us, once last time, to thank the Conservatives for fixing problems created by the wicked Conservatives. You sigh now, but we’ll miss Hot Dog Toryism after today. All they were ever trying to do was find the guys who did all this.

“Sir Keir Starmer will shortly become our Prime Minister,” he continued. “Whatever our disagreements in this campaign, he is decent public-spirited man who I respect.” Was it yet 48 hours since the Tories had been saying that “Sir Sleepy” was a lazy dilettante who posed a clear threat to national security?

But enough of such sniping. Sunak’s final remarks were directed at, well, you can draw your own conclusions. He had been proud, he told us, of how little drama there had been about the appointment of a Hindu prime minister. “We must hold true to that idea of who we are,” he said. “That vision of kindness, decency and tolerance that has always been the British way.”

Behind the soon-to-be-former prime minister stood his wife, Akshata, wearing a dress of black and white zig-zag stripes that seemed designed to confuse enemy submarines about her course and speed. She was carrying an umbrella, another measure that would, on the whole, have been more useful if deployed some time earlier.

“This is a difficult day,” Sunak observed with understatement of such epic proportions that I wondered if we’d misjudged his comic skills, “at the end of a number of difficult days.” And with that, he was off to the Palace to resign as prime minister, two years to the day after he resigned as chancellor.

While we waited for the new fellow, out in the commentariat there was much talk of how disappointing his record-breaking majority was. For those of us who have over the last couple of years become connoisseurs of reports that Labour’s lead was soft and that Starmer hadn’t sealed the deal, it was pleasing to see them continue oblivious to a majority above 170. It can only be days before we’re assured that the Conservatives have a narrow path to victory in 2029.

It was becoming clear that even the weather hates the Conservatives. If Sunak’s Downing Street appearances were memorable for the rain, the sun now came out for Starmer. Downing Street was full of Labour members, utterly delighted that their day had come. They were equipped with union jack umbrellas, but they turned out not to need them.

The new prime minister climbed out of his car and shook their hands, hugged them, kissed them. Then, when they had finished cheering, he addressed them. He offered a somewhat faint tribute to Sunak, “the first British Asian prime minister of our country”, for “the dedication and hard work he brought to his leadership”, and then got down to trashing him by implication.

It was a closing rebuke not just to the Conservatives, but to his own party’s amateur dramatists

“Now our country has voted decisively for change, for national renewal, and a return of politics to public service,” he began. “When the gap between the sacrifices made by people and the service they receive from politicians grows this big, it leads to a weariness in the heart of a nation.” The words were so gently delivered that you might almost have missed their brutal condemnation of the previous government.

His promise in response to the years of Conservative chaos was tedium, “a government unburdened by doctrine” that would “end the era of noisy performance”. It was a closing rebuke not just to the Conservatives, but to his own party’s amateur dramatists. With that, he set off to begin the serious business of government. And in another part of Westminster, Nigel Farage prepared to hold a press conference. There are some people who hope the era of noisy performance is only just getting going.