The world gapes at Britain in amazement and arrives at the conclusion that we must be having some sort of national nervous breakdown. The most dramatic expression of that view has come from Mark Rutte, the prime minister of the Netherlands and a disappointed Anglophile, who declares: “England has collapsed politically, monetarily, constitutionally and economically.” That’s over-saucing the language of apocalypse, but you can understand why even level-headed Dutchmen turn hyperbolic when they gaze across the English Channel. Stability is supposed to be one of our strongest national brands. Over the past 10 days, Britain has behaved like a country without either a government or an opposition as both our major parties have been convulsed by cascading crises. If the climate were a bit warmer, people would be calling us a banana republic.

The prime minister elected just a year ago has been toppled by a referendum-cum-coup. David Cameron was astonishingly cool when he faced parliament and the meltdown of his government was somewhat disguised by the simultaneous civil war devouring the Labour party, but he is a dead prime minister walking, a man decapitated by his fatal miscalculations and the treacherous ambitions of people he mistook for friends. Humiliation has also been heaped on George Osborne. Not so long ago, the chancellor was many a pundit’s favourite to be the next prime minister. He will not even be a candidate for the succession and his fiscal plans are being consigned to the shredder.

You may recall that the Tories spent the election campaign last year telling Britons to sign up for their deficit-reduction programme or risk economic Armageddon. Those same Tories are now binning their commitments as if they were old shopping lists. This may be sensible when the governor of the Bank of England is warning that Brexit Britain faces “economic post-traumatic stress”. But such sudden lurches in policy are not likely to instil confidence in British economic decision-making. As for what is actually intended by Brexit, we are still no closer to an answer to that towering question than on the night of the referendum. “Can we get back to you on that?” has been the message to the world from the government as the Tory party has descended into an orgy of political assassination.

Boris Johnson knifed David Cameron in the back only then to be stabbed in the front by his erstwhile comrade, Michael Gove. That was poetic justice for the former mayor who destroyed his leader and unleashed turmoil on his country by championing a cause in which he never believed. As for Mr Gove, in a matter of days he has ruined the premiership of Mr Cameron and then wrecked Mr Johnson’s ambition to succeed to Number 10.

To murder the two largest figures in the Tory firmament is quite a double. To the bitter delight of them both, Mr Gove seems to have been mortally wounded in the process. Only a handful of Tory MPs turned up to cheer him on when he launched his bid for the job he has often declared himself incapable of doing. The Conservative party can live with a rat, but even it recoils from a double rat.

“Who can ever trust him again?” asks one Tory MP. Many others simply preface his name with words beginning with a “c” or an “f”.

In such turbulent times, it seems reckless to dare venture any predictions about what is going to happen next. I’m going to take the risk of making a forecast. I suggest to you that we have probably passed peak chaos in the Tory party.

Conservatives don’t mind being seen as ruthless, but they are troubled when they start to look ludicrous. That is feeding a strong desire among Tory MPs to cart away their dead, mop up the blood and place a steady hand on the wheel. They are now looking for a restoration of leadership and order. Enter, with perfect timing, Theresa May. The rapid gravitation of support to the home secretary is driven by this yearning among Tories for the chaos to be over.

In her quiet but deadly way, Mrs May has been the most ruthless player of them all. She kept her head down during the poisonous battles between fellow Tories during the referendum campaign, winning some points for loyalty by paying lip service to the prime minister’s position while saying nothing to infuriate the other side. She waited for the Tory boys to finish knifing each other in their pantomime version of House of Cards and then elegantly stepped over their twitching corpses to seize pole position for the succession. Offering herself as a serious person for a serious time is a shrewd pitch. The choice of next Tory leader, and therefore prime minister, is ultimately in the hands of Tory activists so it is important to remember what they are like. They are predominantly elderly. They mainly live in shires and suburbs. They want a leader who looks and sounds like a prime minister. They think that their party had its best years when it was led by a woman of steely fibre. Mrs May is unlike Mrs Thatcher in quite a lot of significant ways, but she is similar to the party’s old heroine in enough respects to tick an awful lot of boxes for the Tory selectorate. Some of them and some Tory MPs may be a bit wary that Mrs May was, at least nominally, a Remainer, but she has already moved to settle doubts by declaring her acceptance of Brexit. It will be the sort of irony that politics loves to throw up if the referendum propels into Number 10 a woman who played virtually no role in the result.

The five candidates for the leadership will be whittled down to a shortlist of two in a series of ballots of Tory MPs, the first this Tuesday. Technically, this could take three rounds and last until Tuesday week. My strong hunch is that it will be over this week as unpopular candidates drop out before they are formally eliminated. Two names will then be put to Tory activists. Unless, which seems increasingly possible, the home secretary so runs away with support from MPs that she is crowned queen of the Tories without the bother of a ballot of the members.

So by early September, and conceivably much sooner than that, the Conservative party will have a new leader who will then be hosannaed at the party conference in October in a choreographed display of adulation. Historically, the Tory party has had a genius for switching from darkest treachery to sycophantic unity and performing the somersault at astonishing speed.

So there is a clearly marked route out of its current turmoil and back to something resembling stability for the Conservative party. The same, I’m afraid, cannot be said for Labour. How its agonies are going to be resolved is much harder to foresee. If Jeremy Corbyn were any other leader, he would have been gone by now. In fact, he would have gone on Monday when he lost most of his shadow cabinet. So many of his frontbenchers have quit that Labour is simply no longer functional as a parliamentary opposition. Pat Glass was appointed as a substitute shadow education spokeswoman on Monday only then to resign by Wednesday, setting a new allcomers record for the brevity with which she was in post.

By an unprecedented margin of four to one, Labour MPs have declared that they have no confidence in Mr Corbyn. Every single living former leader of the party has implored him to go. This is so wide and so deep that it cannot be characterised as a “plot” by “embittered Blairites”. The resignees and the no-confidence voters included many Labour MPs who had done their best to try to make his leadership work. What happened in the Labour party in parliament last week was not so much a coup as a riot of despair.

The deeper tragedy is that this period presented a golden opportunity for any half-decent opposition to present itself to the country as an authoritative voice. Rarely has Britain so needed an effective alternative to the government. Brexit was rejected by 48% of voters and there are second thoughts among some of the 52% and expressions of regret by many who failed to vote. That’s a lot of potential energy and support waiting to be tapped by a confident Labour party under attractive leadership.

This weekend, senior Labour figures are still clinging to the hope that Mr Corbyn will finally reach the conclusion that his position is unsustainable and announce that he is standing down. Attempts are being made to persuade him that there is a way to depart that does not look as if he has abandoned his supporters and betrayed his causes. A vacancy would allow an open contest involving multiple candidates. If Mr Corbyn does not resign, then his MPs will have to take the bloodier course. They have gone way too far to pull back from triggering a formal challenge to his leadership that will pitch them directly against many of the party’s members. If that does not unseat him, it becomes increasingly hard to see how the party can avoid a trajectory that leads to a formal split.

While the Tories are probably past peak chaos, for Labour the worst may be yet to come.