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I've now lived through 13 Prime Ministers and, in my former incarnation as a political journalist, even interviewed a few of them.
I have been reserving judgment on the new Prime Minister until we knew the shape of her Cabinet and specifically whether she intended to emphasise party unity and recognise talent by building an inclusive team, or whether she merely intended to prioritise loyalty by rewarding her own supporters.
Well now we know, and even though both Nadine Dorries and Priti Patel have thankfully gone, we have probably the most right-wing Cabinet the country has seen for 100 years or more.
I have watched the long-drawn out tragi-comedy of Boris Johnson's downfall and the equally interminable farce of the subsequent leadership election process with a growing sense of despair for the future of our country.
Here are a few reflections on the transition from Johnson to Liz Truss and why I believe we may have just achieved something that many thought impossible: electing an even worse Prime Minister than the one we have just got rid of.
1. A few months back, post-Partygate but pre-Pincher, some good friends asked me how on earth Boris Johnson was still in office. I responded by saying that many Tory MPs had not yet moved against him for fear that they could end up with someone even worse.
If the MPs had been in a position to control the choice of his successor, the letters to Sir Graham Brady would have gone in much sooner, but there was always a risk that once the decision went to the party membership, they would put in someone even less palatable to the MPs than Johnson.
At that time, the obvious successor and most popular choice among the MPs was Rishi Sunak, but as I explained to my friends, there was never the remotest chance that the party membership would choose him as leader. I'll leave it to your imagination to work out why that was the case.
Tory MPs should have worked this out and ensured that Penny Mordaunt got onto the ballot paper as the Stop Truss candidate. But the momentum was behind Rishi at that stage and the support of the extreme right-wing European Research Group (of whom more below) was enough to see Truss through.
2. All of the above happened because of what now has to be seen as the spectacularly misguided and arguably unconstitutional decision made by William Hague in 2001 to extend the franchise for electing party leaders from MPs to the party membership, copying a decision made by Labour in 1980.
Because of this, we have now ended up with Truss as Prime Minister with the support of less than a third of her MPs, in the same way as we ended up with Jeremy Corbyn as leader of the Labour Party with the support of only a small rump of his MPs, some of whom only put him on the ballot paper out of a misguided desire to be 'inclusive.'
It is time both parties recognised that we live in a parliamentary democracy rather than a presidency, and that a party leader always needs to be able to command the support of a majority of his or her backbenchers - particularly when a party is in government and electing not just a leader but a Prime Minister.
The past few weeks have done the Conservative Party absolutely no favours, with decisions affecting the whole country being made by a tiny and very unrepresentative section of the electorate, rather than the MPs who we supposedly elect to Parliament to make those decisions for us. This is not democracy in any meaningful sense.
3. Boris Johnson showed what a political operator he continues to be with a barnstorming speech from the steps of No 10 this morning, in contrast with Ms Truss's truly dreadful acceptance speech the previous day.
As usual, though, there was the complete abdication of responsibility for his own downfall and attempt to blame his colleagues for "changing the rules half way through" (er, they didn't) when really he only has himself and his own character flaws to blame for the premature conclusion to his premiership.
The great irony is that the public would probably have forgiven him a few lockdown gatherings if he had been honest aout the fact they had taken place. Instead he threw his press secretary Allegra Stratton under the bus and pretended they had not happened.
Although it was the Chris Pincher affair that got him in the end, his premiership was doomed from this point, proving once again the old Watergate truism: "It's not the crime, it's the cover-up that gets you."
4. Athough Truss is a terrible public speaker (look up her 2014 party conference speech on cheese imports and pork markets on YouTube if you don't believe me), that need not necessarily be an impediment to being a great Prime Minister (think Clement Attlee.)
Her speech outside Number 10 this afternoon was a considerable improvement on yesterday's and at least had the merit of being more honest than Johnson's - admittedly both fairly low bars - but it's the content of what she says rather than her wooden style of delivery that really matters.
Sure, she demonstrated that addressing the energy crisis and sorting out emergency care in the NHS remains at or near the top of her agenda, although if today's briefings are anything to go by, the measures set to be announced to freeze energy bills remain somewhat in a state of flux.
But talking about "getting Britain working again" and tackling the issues that are "holding Britain back" merely implies that she is inheriting a country that isn't working and is being held back - presumably by the government of which she has been a part for the last eight years.
5. And so to that Cabinet. By not reaching out to Sunak or his supporters - in fact by sacking every single one of them who previously served in Cabinet - Ms Truss has made her task of uniting the party after a particularly divisive leadership election that much harder.
While the appointment of Kwasi Kwarteng as Chancellor was expected given their long personal history, I'm really not sure what she sees in new Foreign Secretary James Cleverly who, nice chap though he is, has always struck me as an example of reverse nominative determinism.
As was often the case with Tony Blair's cabinets, there are also some square pegs in round holes. Why make Kemi Badenoch international trade secretary when both the education and culture briefs were up for grabs? Why move Anne-Marie Trevelyan to transport when Penny Mordaunt was available?
Badenoch and Mordaunt were both leadership rivals so maybe Truss didn't want them in jobs where they might have started to feel too comfortable. If so, it's another example of putting party management considerations before the good of the country.
6. But the appointment I am most seriously concerned about - and the one which most clearly signals the direction the government intends to go in - is that of Suella Braverman as Home Secretary. This is an appointment which genuinely fills me with dread to the point of actually making me feel slightly physically sick.
It is clear from her previous comments that Braverman will try to take Britain out of the European Court of Human Rights in order to implement the absurd and immoral policy of deporting economic migrants and asylum seekers to Rwanda, undoing an historic British post-war achievement that was credited in part to Sir Winston Churchill.
Braverman probably owes her preferment to some sort of deal between Truss and the European Research Group to back her rather than Mordaunt in the final ballot of MPs which resulted in Truss and Sunak being the two names which went to the party membership (see above.)
The ERG have been a consistently malign and divisive influence on British politics over the past six years and if Truss is in hoc to them in any way, it does not bode well for her premiership
7. It follows from all of the above that I believe Truss faces an uphill struggle even to survive the next two years without facing a vote of confidence from her own MPs, let alone get the party into a position from which it can win a General Election in 2024. All of which begs the question: can Boris come back?
You don't have to re-read his leaving speech too many times to see the clues - the references to Cincinnatus, a Roman politician who did indeed "return to his plough" but was also later recalled to power, and the analogy of a rocket booster splashing down in a "remote corner of the Pacific."
For me this has all the hallmarks of what used to be known in political circles as a retreat to Colombey-les-deux-Eglises, after the quiet French village that General de Gaulle retired to after the war while awaiting the call to return as President of France, which he eventually did 13 years later.
Any hope of a comeback would require the Commons Privileges Committee to clear him of deliberately misleading the House over Partygate, but if it does so, it could be game on. And since Boris Johnson has already brought down three Prime Ministers, including himself, a fourth would seem no more than par for the course.
