It marked a suitably chaotic climax to a day of high farce. Even Mr Djokovic’s hearing at the Federal Circuit Court in Melbourne, intended as an earnest examination of his rights to remain in Australia, unravelled quickly into the theatre of the absurd. 

A video link capable of handling a few dozen users at most crashed under the dial-ins of a huge international audience, with dubious YouTube rip-offs of the official feed multiplying by the minute. One stream was hijacked by pranksters playing loud music and pornography.

This was far from the only slapstick on display. In one of the rare interludes when the feed was working smoothly, a member of the public forgot to press the mute button as he joined, shouting: “We’re in!” It prompted a withering rebuke from the judge. “Can I ask whoever is on screen to mute themselves,” he chided. “The only people who should be online with their microphones are those who are making submissions to the court.”

Try as he might to draw some sense from the tangled legal arguments, Judge Kelly still could not find a way around Australia’s Kafkaesque Covid rules. One of his first decisions was that Mr Djokovic, who started his day in the glorified detention facility of Carlton’s Park Hotel, should be transferred to an alternative location to follow the updates in his case. The natural choice was the office of his Melbourne solicitors, Hall & Wilcox. Just one problem – this location, like so many others in the city, operated a “no vax, no entry” policy.

Increasingly, the judge was losing patience with the nightmarish bureaucracy. When Christopher Tran, the government’s lawyer, launched into a long list of the legal precedents he would be citing, he interrupted, wearily: “Mr Tran, have you said nearly everything you want to say at this point?” Roughly translated, this meant that the court was already 54 minutes late for lunch.

On the resumption, Mr Tran was given a mere 30 minutes in which to make his case. By contrast, Mr Djokovic’s lawyers, led by Nick Wood of Svensson Barristers, had been allowed over three hours. It was a fair sign that Judge Kelly was leaning towards Mr Djokovic’s position, not least when he said: “The point I am somewhat agitated about is what more could this man have done?”

At 5.16pm, the outcome was settled, with the judge demanding not only Mr Djokovic’s immediate release from detention on the grounds that his visa had been revoked unreasonably, but also for the government to pay his legal costs. It seemed, for a moment, like a neat resolution to a fiendish saga. But little in this story is quite as it seems – soon enough, the Djokovic family briefed that Novak had been rearrested, a story given credence by the sight of federal police in white vans entering the car park beneath his lawyers’ Collins Street office.