There is no way back for Liz Truss. This is as farcical as it ever gets

One way you can tell that it hasn’t necessarily been a functional day in Westminster is when it ends with rumours – and we must make clear these are only rumours – that a Tory MP may have been physically attacked by Jacob Rees-Mogg.

Before that, the prime minister had forced her own MPs to vote to reintroduce fracking – a direct breach of their own manifesto commitment – or else bring down the government, which 40 of them decided to do anyway, one of her special advisers was suspended, the chief whip, the deputy chief whip and the home secretary all resigned. All of which means there is barely even space to mention the most brutalising session of prime minister’s questions I personally can ever recall, which also featured a double U-turn on the not-exactly-trivial subject of the size of the state pension.

There’s not much choice but to deal with all of the interlocking s***shows one by one. Labour called a vote to ban the reintroduction of fracking, which in her infinite wisdom, Liz Truss chose to declare was also a confidence vote in the government, thereby forcing all of her MPs to publicly declare themselves in favour of the least popular policy since the poll tax, or else force a general election.

All afternoon, little tremors were heard. An MP here and there, Chris Skidmore, Tracey Crouch, declaring that they didn’t care if it meant losing the whip, they weren’t going to vote for it. Then Graham Stuart, the climate minister, breezily announced at the despatch box that actually it wasn’t a confidence vote. Then very large numbers of Tory MPs went insane and demanded he make clear whether or not voting against the government would mean losing the whip, and he refused to answer. And then, when the vote did actually happen, it has been alleged, many times by a number of different MPs, that the deputy prime minister Therese Coffey, and Jacob Rees-Mogg turned up to physically push their own colleagues through the voting lobbies.

Rees-Mogg has now attributed all this to some kind of mix-up. That it really had been a confidence vote all along, and so he had, to paraphrase Jean-Jaques Rousseau, merely been forcing his friends to be free. That if any manhandling occurred, it was clearly for the victims’ benefit, as clearly they didn’t understand that if their superiors hadn’t arrived to shove them through the correct doors then they probably didn’t even know that they’d be out of a job.

What is not alleged, however, is that all this has ended with both the chief whip and the deputy chief whip apparently resigning and, though this is not a formal statement, the view of the deputy chief whip on the matter, as shouted rather loudly in the room just outside the commons chamber, was: “I am f***ing furious and I don’t give a f*** anymore.”

He was not the only one. When the vote finally passed, with fully 326 Tory MPs declaring themselves to be pro-fracking, the Commons chamber was a scene of complete anarchy. The Labour MP Chris Bryant, and others, rose to describe the scenes he’d seen in the lobbies, with members being “manhandled” and “bullied” and “harrassed”. The chief whip Wendy Morton, who had been scurrying around in a state of complete panic, at some point scurried off to resign.

And while all this was going on, the home secretary resigned as well. She was instructed to go, we are told, for accidentally selecting the wrong drop-down option on her phone, and sending some really not-very-sensitive-at-all government information to an MP from her Gmail account, not her secure one. It’s not really the sort of thing you really have to sack a minister for, but it’s the sort of thing that will do if you’re looking to sack them anyway.

Which Liz Truss clearly is. She is clearly looking to shore up her position among her own MPs by yielding to the party’s more moderate side, which she just resoundingly defeated in a leadership election. And who knows, it could even work, for a little while, but the trouble is it just makes her look ever more mad, ever more ridiculous and ever more out of control, which she certainly is.

Before any of this even began, she had to have one of her special advisors suspended and investigated for – allegedly again – giving out anonymous and highly vituperative briefings to newspapers about other MPs. And she also announced in Prime Minister’s Questions that she’d be keeping the triple lock on pensions, which her spokesperson and her brand new chancellor had refused to do two days earlier.

One tends to forget – one tends to just block it out – but the May years felt calm by comparison. And those years were chaotic because she was trying to force the House of Commons to do something it didn’t want to do, and without a parliamentary majority. Liz Truss still has, nominally, a 71-seat majority (though at the time of typing it genuinely isn’t clear whether 40 of them have or haven’t just lost the whip) but she has conspired to make herself entirely loathed by everyone. By her own side, by her new captors, by the financial markets and most definitely by the voters.

There was a hope that, after the chaos of last week, all of this might now blow over. Instead she has walked into a hurricane of her own making.

Still, whatever happens, at least it won’t be her that has to go home and tell their mates that they got beaten up by Jacob Rees-Mogg.