Whom the gods would destroy, they first make mad. And when the fancy takes them, they sadistically subject Tory governments visibly on the skids to cunningly-designed symbolic torment, calibrated perfectly to maximise exposure of the unwilling victims’ manifold ethical shortcomings.

In their ways, the Profumo scandal, cash for questions and Grenfell Tower are all modern-day miniature morality tales, there for the political edification of the many as well as the few. The first two presaged the downfall of the Macmillan and Major premierships respectively; the latter will surely bookend May’s days in Number Ten.

Grenfell Tower – its burned-out skeleton rising above Britain’s richest borough, in a seat that had just one week earlier fallen to Labour – is effectively a parable on the theme of private affluence and public squalor. After what has happened, it is not obvious that there is now any way back for the Tories; what is clear is that there does not deserve to be.

All of these episodes somehow encapsulate a Zeitgeist. Spotlighting in turn the hollow hypocrisy of bourgeois sexual morality, the bog standard venality of backbenchers on the take, and now the impact of austerity on the lives of the working poor, each graphically indicted a complacent rightwing administration that could serve further gainful purpose.

Perhaps it is worth recapping the earlier incidents, starting with the first. We as witnesses to love in the time of Simon Danczuk naturally experience difficulty in visualising a nation more shocked than titillated by tawdry revelations from the boudoir.

Today a male politician – even a cabinet minister – caught between the sheets with a sex worker would likely not lose his job, with any admonishment more likely to come from feminist quarters than from upholders of marital fidelity. Christine Keeler would perhaps be posting cleavage-revealing selfies on Twitter and seeking selection as a Labour PPC.

Yet even from this distance, that her other clients included an intelligence operative of a country deemed to incarnate the very ideology most frequently counterposed to British democracy retains some power to shock.

Perhaps a contemporary analogy would be the news that one of Boris Johnson’s partners in amorous dalliance was simultaneously sharing a bed with a senior figure in so-called Islamic State.

Profumo, of course, compounded matters by his dishonesty, dissembling before the House of Commons in much the manner of Bill Clinton at the height of the Lewinsky imbroglio.

But Profumo did have sexual relations with that woman, and it was never glad confident morning again; shortly thereafter, Macmillan stepped down, and Alec Douglas-Home – the last Eton-educated prime minister prior to Cameron – survived a fag-end year before being replaced by Wilson.

Thereafter, the Conservatives wisely eschewed the promulgation of family values, until the 1990s, when John Major chose to resurrect the right’s association with them under the slogan of ‘back to basics’.

Almost predictably, this newly-erected roof caved in shortly thereafter, with ministerial indiscretions ranging from adulterous hotel room legovers allegedly undertaken in Chelsea football strip to a death brought on by over-enthusiastic indulgence in the solitary vice while practising erotic auto-asphyxiation.

In 1994, the Guardian published a story contending that lobbyists shoved brown paper envelopes stuffed with cash into the clammy hands of Conservative MPs ready to table questions on behalf of the owner of an upmarket department store in Knightsbridge. This time it was the political process itself that was prostituted, with furore dragging on for years.

Major stepped down as Tory leader in 1995, only be chosen again in a gesture that backfired every bit as self-defeatingly as May’s recent bumbled effort to win a stronger Brexit mandate.

Meanwhile, the drip-drip nature of the unfavourable reportage led to the coining of the expression ‘Tory sleaze’, setting the scene for Labour’s landslide triumph of 1997. Blair’s protestation that his new government would be ‘purer than pure’ never found definitive fruition, to put it charitably. But that is the subject of another polemic.

The Grenfell Tower tragedy was – at the time of writing – known to have claimed the lives of 79 men, women and children, with the death toll likely to rise further still.

And for what? For want of fireproof cladding would have cost an additional £5,000, after a Tory council under a Tory government opted for regeneration on the cheap, and that largely motivated by the aesthetic pleasure of the area’s wealthier residents.

Meanwhile – as Jeremy Corbyn has pointed out – seven years of austerity have seen many local authorities cut back on fire testing and inspections, simply because they have insufficient staff to undertake such vital tasks.

For decades, the small state butted out of social housing, and privatised and deregulated such social housing as it was obliged to provide because minimum-wage immigrant cleaners have to live somewhere. The denouement of right-to-buy is horribly upon us.

British politics now finds itself characterised by a government bereft of any sense of direction beyond platitudinous appeals to Brexit patriotism, blithely compounding unforced error upon further unforced error, and an opposition has reinvigorated by its two-year embrace of democratic socialism.

Much like Wilson after Profumo and Blair after cash for questions, Corbyn after Grenfell Tower finds himself gifted with a trashed Tory party that has dug its own grave, and an electorate now ready for the Labour alternative.

Theresa May will, of course, try to hang on in there in the wake of her Pyrrhic victory. Let her reverie last as long as it does; whether her assassins be internal or external, the reprieve can only be temporary.

But it is already clear that the next general election will set the direction the country will take in the most decisive period of its postwar history. For the Labour left, the next general election cannot come soon enough.