Instagram is letting us in on the strange world of what cabinet ministers do at night, what with selling themselves off in auctions and dining with oligarchs’ wives

Heady times for cabinet free spirit Liz Truss, who can once more stand in front of her magic mirror and get her preferred answer to the question: “Mirror, mirror on the wall, which secretary of state has the most imbecilic Instagram of all?”

At time of writing, Gavin Williamson’s latest posting on the apocalypse-beckoning photo-sharing platform was still a picture of him with some puppies – very Mariah Carey – which the then defence secretary had captioned: “You can’t be happier than having 7 #cockerspaniel puppies in your arms.” To this, he appended the mordant hashtags #puppies #puppiesofinstagram #dogsofinstragram and, in the interests of wider generalisation, #dogs.

Since the picture was taken, Dame Fortune has turned her wheel. I literally can’t believe Gavin will never deploy an aircraft carrier to the South China Sea again, or threaten to build a military base in the Caribbean. By now, you will know that Theresa May relieved him of his duties in a dramatic meeting on Wednesday night, and that Gavin has been returned to the children’s table of politics. The lethality of the Cabinet Office inquiry into his alleged role in the Huawei leak has STUNNED every messy Westminster bitch who lives for the drama. Which is to say, all of them.

On a personal note, I am appalled that the prime minister should have ousted the only person believed to have watched Top Gun anything near as many times as I have, but failed to make the obvious upgrade when looking for his successor. Williamson is instead replaced as defence secretary by a former contestant in the ITV high-diving reality show Splash!, Penny Mordaunt. (Speaking of mordancy, Penny’s surname has always felt somewhat sarcastic, given her only other claim to fame was saying the word “cock” as many times as she could in a Commons speech as part of a dare with some sailors. Still, I’m sure they respected her all the more for it, and she was excessively grateful to be seen as “just one of the lads”.)

But back to Liz Truss, whose Instagram has itself been the source of a somewhat embarrassing newspaper story this week, concerning a fancy dinner at a Knightsbridge hotel. The prime minister and various cabinet ladies seem to have rented themselves out to a Russian woman named Lubov Chernukhin, who paid £135,000 at an auction for dinner with Theresa May.

Lubov is married to a former deputy finance minister to Vladimir Putin, and on Monday was pictured on Liz’s auto-parodic Insta feed, enjoying a private dinner at the Goring hotel. Fellow guests include Truss, Andrea Leadsom, Karen Bradley – that’s the brains trust dealt with – as well as May, Amber Rudd, immigration minister Caroline Nokes, and the leader of the Lords, Baroness Evans. As Truss captioned the photograph: “And it’s ladies night #cabinetandfriends #girlpower.” Or as you might caption it: “We’re her private dancers #dancersformoney #we’lldowhatyouwantustodo.”

First impressions? £135,000 might seem like a lot. But if the Tories want to make serious money, they should surely be asking: what would people pay NOT to have dinner with May ever again? I’ve got a phone bidder on the line from Windsor, who’s offering Hampton Court, three tiaras and a half share in Norfolk.

Anyway, on to Lubov Chernukhin. I know how all these Tory donors love to be featured in the newspapers, so I’m sure that Chernukhin won’t mind me welcoming her as UK public life’s newest sublebrity – and saying that she appears to be suffering from a range of fairly pronounced spiritual maladies.

How else to explain the fact that, over the past five years – at Tory fundraising events such as their annual Capote-aborting Black and White Ball – madam has paid sums totalling more than a million pounds for experiences other people would cross continents to avoid? Take a look at just some of the line items, and I think you’ll agree that spending a million this way makes the KLF burning theirs look reasonable.

There was £160,000 to play a tennis match against Boris Johnson and David Cameron. There was 9,600 – pounds, not roubles – to Brandon Lewis. Last year, Lubov went on quite the spree at the annual Tory fundraiser, spending £20,000 to have dinner with Ruth Davidson. It was unclear whether she put in for the evening’s most enticing lot – dinner with Michael Gove and his wife Sarah Vine – and was simply outbid by a petrostate sovereign wealth fund, or a masochist. What she did manage to scoop, however, was dinner at the Churchill War Rooms with Williamson. Which feels a bit like dinner at Humphrey Bogart’s former home with Taylor Lautner. Whether this soiree ever took place is unclear, but if it turns out Gavin was sacked before having to sit through dinner with Lubov, there might not be enough cocker spaniel puppies in Britain to console him.

As for the Goring dinner this week, that was supposed to stay secret, and it is worth marvelling at the fact that we only know about it because the chief secretary to the Treasury leaked it to her own Instagram. As one government source told Politico: “This just shows how desperately poor her judgment is. Already overheard bitching about colleagues, she’s now dropped them in it for the sake of a few likes on Instagram. One female MP told me tonight that:‘This is why she’ll have about three supporters come election time.’”

Oooooooh! I’m sure we’d all imagined the various directions this sensationally dysfunctional government could go – down, further down, and subterranean. But its leaky, backstabbing, socialite-heavy metamorphosis into a very off-brand version of Gossip Girl is somehow unexpected, and we must watch how the show unfolds with new interest.