London - Outside a grand west London house where Holland Park turns into Notting Hill, a team of armed police officers stood guard last night. They've never been there before.
They arrived in a flurry of activity, driving the red response cars of the Diplomatic Protection Group, better known in diplomatic circles as 'Doors Porches Garages' - the only places you're ever likely to spot them.
They've been hanging around on the front doorstep of Tony Blair's place off the Edgware Road for almost a decade.
Whether this really is the Camerons’ temporary home from home, just while the kids finish school for the term - well, they wouldn't say. But a night under armed guard in a west London mansion (albeit one which sold two years ago for more than £16m) still represents a crashing down to Earth at the end of a day spent on that sad circle between the despatch box of the House of Commons, the steps of 10 Downing Street and finally, Buckingham Palace.
For events that scarcely occur once a decade, any historical similarity is enough to spark a tradition. When David Cameron emerged from behind the Number 10 door, into a gathering storm and under the usual whirr of the helicopters, his wife Samantha and their three children came out too, as Gordon Brown's had done. A first full exposure for little lives nonetheless lived under the glare of the public spotlight. Florence Cameron, not yet six, knows no other life, no other home than this, the grandest one of all. She had once, he said, when dad was off on a foreign trip, climbed into his red box and said “Take me with you”.
It was hard, in such circumstances, not to think of the fourth child, Ivan, who died in 2009. His ghostly presence a reminder of other ghosts that lurked. His godparents, Michael Gove and Steve Hilton, who had done so much to sabotage the life of their friend. And their country too, it is now so plainly obvious. One had the unswerving zeal of the reformist. The other had a book to sell. Both depart the scene with little success and even less dignity.
“It has been the greatest honour of my life to serve our country as Prime Minister over these last six years,” he said, his voice never cracking in the way it had done on that rarefied morning not yet three weeks ago. “And to serve as leader of my party for almost eleven years.”
It was a show of great dignity. The great class act in public life for more than decade. But he leaves his country in the thrall of its greatest crisis in generations. And he leaves his party back in the thrall of the palaeolithic forces from which he once rescued it.
As the door of the Prime Ministerial jaguar clicked shut, the kids following on behind, the gates of Downing Street swung open and a loud chorus of boos rang out.
All political careers end in failure, it is often said. Certainly the successful ones do. But rarely as brutal or as total as this. The consequences, though not yet clear, are profound and inevitable. And none more certain than the arrival, on foot, two and half hours later, of an ambulant barrel under a mess of blonde hair, walking in the other direction, and heading through that same old door.
THE INDEPENDENT