As a ferociously keen Bible student, Andrea Leadsom will know whether she is predicted in the Book of Revelation. For those of us operating on a lower plane, condemned to pick through the entrails of the past fortnight, the portents are not hugely encouraging. On the basis that most things that could have gone wrong have, there is absolutely no reason to think that Andrea doesn’t have an excellent chance of nicking this.

Before we go on, however, congratulations are in order for the sensationally misguided generation of politicians from Gordon Brown to David Cameron who were always going on about wanting “an X factor politics”. They have finally got their wish. I’m not sure if the official psephological study confirming this is out yet, but the referendum result was the exact equivalent of series seven of Simon Cowell’s apocalypse-beckoning karaoke show, in which Essex decorator Matt Cardle beat One Direction. One Direction! Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure Matt is perfectly sufferable. I’m sure you can get through him, one way or another. But last year, One Direction were the world of celebrity’s fourth largest economy.

And so to the act many can only hope is the Wagner in all this. On Thursday morning Andrea Leadsom delivered her promised “major speech” on the economy like she’d just won a competition to deliver a major speech on the economy. All the eye-catching endorsements had been pouring in for Leadsom. Nigel Farage. Nick Griffin. Katie Hopkins. There had been rumours that fellow backer Boris Johnson would introduce her, but the former leadership favourite presumably regarded the chance to play the Spinal Tap to Andrea’s Puppet Show as simply too much perspective.

“I am an optimist,” Andrea began. Indeed, her CV lists her as a former Director of Optimism Compliance at the Bank of Unicorns for All. Please don’t regard the developing row over Andrea’s CV as in some way detrimental to her prospects, incidentally. We are very much not in Kansas any more. It is already being suggested that the “confusion” over Andrea’s career in finance will keep the media returning handily to her City background and life beyond politics. As one of her key supporters put it delightedly to the Times: “This will turn out to be her £350m claim – the embellishment (if that is what it turns out to be) that works.”

I don’t know about you, but I’m psyched that we’re already in the second golden age of post-fact politics – the time when an “embellishment” is regarded as so brilliant that it harks back to the great “embellishments” of the first golden age (which was last month).

“I want to speak to the markets,” Leadsom smiled, with the air of someone who imagines you can negotiate with gravity. There was absolutely nothing to fear, she went on, smiling that smile again. Andrea Leadsom’s smile is terrifying. It is the smile of the school careers adviser telling you flatly that the school is looking for a night caretaker. It is a smile that is powered by the extinguishing of your future. You can’t escape Andrea’s smile. And it’ll certainly come for you if you try.

The address ended with her supporters being instructed by Leadsom backer Penny Mordaunt to march up to parliament to impress upon Tory MPs voting that day the need to do their duty. Andrea took a car herself, but it’s the thought that counts. To watch them make their way up Millbank was to picture The Walking Dead on the Countryside Alliance march. There was drill sergeant Tim Loughton MP. “What do we want?” he demanded. “Leadsom for leader!” they shouted back. “When do we want it?” he inquired. “NOW!”

There were T-shirts over suits. There was perennial Stupidest Backbencher contender Peter Bone, several non-party members, a brachiosaurus with fairly eye-watering views on civil partnerships, and a few prematurely tweeded need-to-belongers, who – had they been born under other stars – would probably have ended up trying to set fire to their trainers in an aisle seat on a plane. The entire event was an am-dram peasants’ revolt metaphor against whichever section of the establishment former banker Andrea is pretending not to be part of. Perhaps it will play brilliantly with the membership.

As for the rest of us, it’s hard to imagine where we were before Andrea was deemed a breakout star of the referendum campaign. Yet we still know so tantalisingly little about her. After all, as a junior minister in Her Majesty’s government, Andrea enjoyed the sort of anonymity you’d hope for in one of the better witness protection programmes.

Even the verdicts of her friends tend toward the confusing. “She has steel,” blethered Iain Duncan Smith, “but there is a velvet glove of compassion.” Oh Iain! God knows I’ve learned to manage my expectations as far as IDS is concerned. But I would like a secretary of state who understood a basic despot metaphor before he accidentally deployed it.

'I want to speak to the markets,' Leadsom smiled, with the air of someone who imagines you can negotiate with gravity

Other points of intrigue? Andrea’s the passionate advocate of attachment theory who wants to abolish maternity rights. If you’re one of those people who imagines that the latter two positions are in some way contradictory, you are strongly urged to let go of your rational brain and experience Andrea as an idea, a feeling, a repository for thousands of subclinical Thatcher fixations which are less an indicator of her calibre than they are of the stigmatisation of asking for help among a particular stripe of Tory rank and file.

At least 50% of her public statements sound as if they were said for a dare. “Let’s banish pessimists.” “Boris Johnson is a lovely man.” The rest sound like she’s assembling endtimes magnetic fridge poetry. As a mum, Leadsom would like her hands on the nuclear codes. She likes to retreat to cooking the Sunday roast, which – contrary to what you may have heard – is not always a homosexual. This homespun hard-arse stuff is pushed with sledgehammer deliberateness – an attempt to position her as Brexit’s Bisto mum.

Which leaves us with Theresa May. Has it really come to this? Yes. Yes, I’m afraid it has. There are few neater indicators of quite how far we’ve travelled over the past 14 days than to find so many people, particularly non-Tory voters, now actively yearning for it to be Theresa May. “Christ,” muttered one friend with wry despair, “I now want this more than I did Obama.” Yup, we’re all realpolitikos now. Stick a fork in my dreams. They’re done.