The departure of a British prime minister after just 45 days in office should feel more significant, an event of gravity and substance; instead it felt oddly anti-climactic.

In recent days, her appearances in public, looking nonplussed, suggested someone who knew her departure was just a matter of time, and so it proved.

One almost feels sympathy for the future generations of historians who will have to try to put the Truss administration in context — how to evaluate a government which lasted barely six weeks?

The financial meltdown caused by the ‘mini budget’ of Truss’s chancellor, Kwasi Kwarteng, which led the IMF to express concerns about Britain and forced the Bank of England to intervene to stabilise the financial markets, is about the only action taken by her administration which is likely to live in the memory.

The other vague markers of the Truss regime — the U-turns, the apologies, the resignations — seem unreal, even though they occurred just days ago.

The traditional step at this stage would be to ponder Truss’s successors, a field of candidates which may yet include her predecessor, Boris Johnson.

However, this week has shown how quickly traditional modes of behaviour can be discarded; at this point the UK’s unprecedented political instability is becoming so dangerous that a general election, which Labour and the Liberal Democrats are demanding, seems the only sensible option to restore political order, and to restore faith in the institutions of state within the UK and without.

The damage done to those institutions in the last seven days alone will take considerably longer to repair, but the sooner that work begins, the better.