Theresa May, the home secretary and a front-runner in the race to be party leader, is not part of that coterie. She is seen as an independent operator who is loath to make boys’-club-style closed-door deals. Appearing to be an actual grown-up, in contrast to the squabbling, backstabbing men now in power, has helped position Ms. May as a welcome antidote to the current disarray. Although, to be fair, she also went to Oxford.

“You’re seeing a closing of the ranks behind a candidate the Conservatives think they can support,” Peter Paul Catterall, who teaches history at the University of Westminster, said of Ms. May. “But it has something of the whiff of people desperate to go for whoever has the ability to keep the lifeboat afloat, even though no one knows where it’s going.”

Still, her ascent wasn’t part of the plan. Mr. Cameron had long been grooming Mr. Osborne to succeed him, but that idea disintegrated when the Leave side unexpectedly won the referendum. Mr. Cameron decided to step down rather than deal with the aftermath, and Mr. Johnson and Mr. Gove rushed to fill the vacuum as a team, focusing not on how, but on who, would govern (namely, the two of them).

Then that alliance, too, fell apart when Mr. Gove abruptly announced that he would run against Mr. Johnson for the party leadership, and Mr. Johnson dropped out. Again, it all seemed personal, parochial and petty, playing out in the news media as Jacobean revenge tragedy or drawing-room farce, take your pick.

The top players in both the Tory and Labour Parties tend to go to parties and dinners with the journalists who cover them, and do their best to court the influential owners of their newspapers, too. In the London government-journalistic complex, everyone is connected to everyone else. Both Mr. Johnson and Mr. Gove were journalists before they became politicians; Mr. Johnson still writes a weekly column for The Daily Telegraph.