I’m hardly breaking any Magic Circle confidences if I say that political comment pieces tend to follow one of two formats.

Scenario one: our time-poor scribbler, faced with an empty page, examines recent events and finds a common thread to weave persuasively through the main goings on. His or her consistent narrative suggests exactly why things have turned out as they have. In some cases a fiendish political strategy forms the story. In others it’s a simple problem at the heart of government that is making things turn sour. The best commentators are picked up by others under similar time pressures and a received wisdom takes hold.

In the second format, the writer simply turns the current narrative on its head. You have to get the timing right on this one, but if you do then a whole new received wisdom gains momentum. Sage strategy of a month before was actually muddled thinking and last week’s rotten ideas were before their time.

So what to do this week?

The received wisdom remains “omnishambles”. The chief whip finally resigns, the Chancellor is made to look foolish on the train and they can’t even kill the badgers on time. It’s not as if the trivia of politics is being allowed to get in the way of the real story on policy. The biggest policy development was the Prime Minister’s rabbit-from-a-hat energy announcement, which took as long to conceive as it did to say. It will take civil servants much longer to lose it in the small print of the Energy Bill.

The media’s off-the-shelf diagnosis for this apparent Horlicks is a government out of touch or a faltering Number 10 machine. But that’s a bit too shop-worn for a column. And the mess is too fresh in the mind to be written as good for the government (though I’m sure it will mark a “turning point” of some kind before long). It’s a tough one for our political columnist.

But is there really a theme that can bring this together in a few hundred words? Or have a host of independent things simply happened at once? That’s a bad break, but it happens. Many criticised Oliver Dowden, deputy chief of staff at Number 10 for his candid remarks that it’s simply crisis management in Downing Street. But faced with a run of coincidental bad decisions and bad luck, what more can the man do?

Get better at it, I suppose.