Why does anyone bother making political predictions?

The Christian Roman Emperor Theodosius had the Delphic Oracle smashed up in 390 AD, but the gifts of the old gods were already well on the way out.

The Sibylline Books were burned shortly after. Scrying glasses across the ancient world had misted over. The prophets fell silent. Well, they hadn’t seen that coming. It was now impossible to foresee what was going to happen next, let alone any further down the line.

You can see where I’m going with this. Who will be prime minister at the end of the week? What brave new policies, set in stone days ago, will be forgotten like waking dreams? Suella Braverman sent some very salty tweets about police commissioners and demonstrators at the weekend, the kind of thing that in a newly appointed Home Secretary would normally lead to a raft of think pieces setting sail. But she could be a backbencher by Thursday, so what does it matter? Why bother?

The answer to every political question right now is ‘your guess is as good as mine’.