What a week. So many players, so many moving parts. So many late substitutions and injury time winners. So much background noise. It was like watching the Old Firm losing in Europe.

Let’s start with Alistair Campbell. “A turd you can’t flush away” was his not-so-fragrant description of Boris Johnson on BBC Two’s Politics Live, the day said item drained a final poolside Daquiri, peeled off his Tory Blue budgie smugglers and flew home – economy, would you believe? Probably not, but it’s true – from his luxury holiday at a plush Caribbean resort.

Why? Because, as he told faithful lieutenant Robert ‘Dudders’ Duddridge MP, he was “up for it” – the ‘it’ being a triumphant return to Number 10 following the resignation of Liz Truss, presumably on a carpet of roses strewn ahead of him by the 81,000 Tory members who helped put him there in the first place. As many as could be dragged away from their golf clubs or second homes and squeezed into Downing Street, anyway.

In classical tradition a Roman general returning in triumph wore a laurel wreath and a purple toga and had his face painted red to make him look like Jupiter. Mr Johnson would doubtless have worn his trademark smirk and a saggy suit and could in no way be described as resembling any sort of heavenly body. Even so, and it’s hard to believe it’s only a few days ago at the time of writing, it did look very much as if the clown prince would soon be back at his expensively wall-papered court.

Hail Boris!, and all that.

But then Sunday dawned and with it a sense of reality. Mr Johnson realised having the mostly rich, mostly white, mostly southern, mostly elderly Tory party membership in his pocket is one thing. Persuading a majority of the 357 (relatively) sensible Tory MPs of his competence, continence, motives, industriousness, moral rectitude and ability to avoid telling porkies in public is another thing entirely. And let’s not even start on what the wider country thinks of him, or what that pesky Standards Committee might say when it finally reports on whether he misled Parliament.

All of which meant Monday dawned with just two candidates in the race to be the next UK Prime Minister, Johnson having withdrawn. Which meant that, because the other candidate was Penny Mordaunt and nobody really wanted her in the first place, Tuesday dawned with Rishi Sunak as the last one standing. He was duly acclaimed, packed off to meet the king, given the keys to the house next door to his old gaff at Number 11 and invited to sit down with the spooks to learn where the bodies are hidden (or given a security briefing, as they prefer to call it).

Meanwhile Mr Johnson shuffled off somewhere to consider a hard truth: that the only similarity between him and a returning Roman hero is the red face. Fail Boris!, and all that.

So goodbye Trussonomics, hello Rishinomics. Goodbye old Cabinet of Monstrosities, hello new Cabinet of Curiosities. Goodbye old, weird twisty Downing Street lectern, hello new normal looking one.

And goodbye Old Etonians – Kwasi, Boris, Jacob – hello Mr Winchester College head boy, a man who cannot be outdone on his knowledge of Star Wars trivia and loves nothing more than pouring over fresh data. Knows his Excel from his Apple Numbers? Yup. Knows his Darth Sidious from his Grand Moff Tarkin? You betcha. Exactly the sort of righteous dude the UK needs right now.

And so the UK has its youngest ever Prime Minister and its first of Asian heritage. Is this is our Obama moment, so-called because the arrival in the White House of a man of colour as the 44th President of the United States was seen as a reckoning of sorts? Maybe. Comedian Trevor Noah’s comment on satirical US news programme The Daily Show that Sunak was already suffering a racist backlash is clearly nonsense (he needs a geography lesson too, having called him “England’s first Prime Minister of colour.”) But so is the counterblast from Sajid Javid, who stated in response: “Britain is the most successful multiracial democracy on earth.”

Aye, right.

Sunak did picked up the phone to Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon, something his predecessor failed to do in her 43 days in office, even though she only had Wordle to occupy her time for most of it. So he has had a Nicola Moment, at least.

So far, so not Boris. But what do we actually know about the new guy, and when we learn more will we like it? The jury’s out, my friends.

We do know he’s clever and there’s nothing there not to like, even if the cost of his public school education was beyond 99.9% of all humans currently living.

At Oxford University he read Politics, Philosophy and Economics, the go-to degree for aspiring leaders. At Stanford University in the US he did an MBA, the go-to qualification for aspiring Masters of the Universe (the ones who wear red braces and work on Wall Street, not the buff, baby oiled sword wielders of the media franchise).

On top of that he’s also a Fulbright Scholar, an honour he shares with former United Nations Secretary General Boutros Boutros-Ghali, composer Aaron Copland, Nobel Prize-winning author JM Coetzee, past or present Prime Ministers of Belgium, Greece, Italy, Sweden, Peru, Croatia, Poland, Brazil, Pakistan and Australia, and (unless someone has hacked the relevant Wikipedia page), drag queen Sasha Velour and He-Man himself, actor Dolph Lundgren. Esteemed company, no?

We also know he is rich. Very rich. Like, oligarch rich. The current estimate of his personal wealth is an eye-watering £730 million. A near-15 year career as a hedge fund manager, initially with Goldman Sachs, accounts for a chunk of that. But the bulk of it comes from his wife, Akshata Murty, whom he met at Stanford. Her dad is the founder of Indian IT company Infosys Ltd., currently valued at well north of £80 billion.

Allow me to be the latest in a long line of people to note this is not a good look in our straightened financial times. It’s just all wrong in the mouth.

There’s more. He was an enthusiastic proponent of Brexit and what about his climate cop out? Normally it would take a No Fly List or being called King Charles to prevent a Brit enjoying an all-expenses paid fortnight at Egypt’s £2000 a night Sharm el-Sheikh resort. But Sunak is voluntarily skipping the upcoming Cop 27 climate change conference there.

He did show up in Glasgow last year when we had the gig – he proudly brandished a green ministerial box for the assembled photographers – but now he’s too busy, apparently. Was it that same crammed diary and groaning to-do list which also brought about the removal of Cop 26 president Alok Sharma MP from his role in Cabinet? Or climate minister Graham Stuart, who suffered the same fate? I’m pleased to see he’s keen on recycling waste, at least. How else can you explain Suella Braverman’s re-appointment as Home Secretary, just days after she resigned for a self-confessed breach of the ministerial code?

“The best and brightest don’t go into politics,” wrote American satirist PJ O’Rourke. “The best and brightest are at Goldman Sachs.”

Sunak is living proof that you can do both, though perhaps O’Rourke’s quip carries an implicit warning – perhaps the verdict on the new Prime Minister will be that he should have stayed in the City. Perhaps he’ll come to the same conclusion, and sooner rather than later. A little stiff, a little wooden, he does not seem like a natural politician even if he doesn’t do full-on weird like his predecessor. And let’s not forget that Steve Bannon also served time at Goldman Sachs before going into politics. Look how well that went.

In all likelihood, then, Sunak’s honeymoon period will be as short as his infamous, ankle-baring trousers. Still, at least he isn’t Boris Johnson. I don’t know about you, but I’m off to celebrate that solitary fact. I might even turn the thermostat up to a dizzy making 16 and pretend I’m in the Caribbean.