The dying days of Rishi Sunak’s black hole government

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? 

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).