Well, that was that, then. Liz Truss lasted half a term as prime minister, like a trainee teacher who appears in September and then is gone when you get back from the October break, her colleagues changing the subject when her name is raised.

The world isn’t run from where Truss thought

She barely lasted more than a month, but frustratingly went past the 28-day period in which we could have returned her with no questions asked. Many of the problems were of course obvious on the day we opened the box: from the slightly odd rhetorical manner to the inability to unite Tory MPs behind her. But her real problem was that, in her utter conviction that her approach was the only correct one, she couldn’t see how it appeared to others.

There’s a scene in Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall when Thomas Cromwell confronts Harry Percy, a man who also thinks he knows it all. “The world is not run from where he thinks. Not from border fortresses, not even from Whitehall. The world is run from Antwerp, from Florence, from places he has never imagined… Not from the castle walls, but from counting houses.”

The world isn’t run from where Truss thought, either. Not from think tanks, not even from Downing Street. She and Kwasi Kwarteng aren’t unusual in modern Tory circles in having contempt for outfits such as the Treasury, the Bank of England and the Office for Budget Responsibility, but they failed to realise that, to the people clicking abacuses in the counting houses, that attitude looked reckless.

The markets destroyed her, but it’s appropriate that final blow was a vote over fracking, something that some Conservative right-wingers had convinced themselves was the answer to all their problems, and which everyone else could see was a political disaster. In so far as her premiership stood for anything, it was the “one neat trick” approach to government, that a simple technique which conventional economists won’t tell you about can eliminate belly fat and deliver instant economic growth.

You’d have to be mad to want the job

Her statement on Thursday was brief, and her manner of delivery decidedly chirpy, given that she had just been found out in the most humiliating way possible. There were no tears. On Monday evening she had looked exhausted, broken. Watch Thursday’s statement with the sound down, and she might be thanking the public for electing her back to office with an increased majority, or welcoming a sporting victory. Perhaps she was glad to be out. Now that the government has abandoned every one of her ideas, there really wasn’t very much point in keeping her.

“I came into office at a time of great economic and international instability,” she began. She leaves at a point of even greater instability, of course, which shows what you can achieve in six weeks, if you really put your mind to it.

“We delivered on energy bills and on cutting national insurance,” she went on. This was pretty much it for achievements. She could have added, I suppose, that she also read the lesson clearly at the Queen’s funeral. Maybe she’ll find a way to talk it up in her LinkedIn entry: oversaw the peaceful transition of power from the world’s longest-serving monarch. Answered questions in Parliament a number of times.

“I recognise though, given the situation, I cannot deliver the mandate on which I was elected by the Conservative Party,” she said. What is that situation, exactly? That things turned out to be more complicated than she thought they were, I guess. Not to worry, at the end of next week we’ll get someone else in Downing Street, offering a new set of simple solutions.

Who will it be? You’d have to be mad to want the job. Fortunately the Conservative Party has no shortage of qualified candidates.