As the callow chumps in Westminster duck and dive, working out how best to game the system in their own selfish interest, the public knows whatever outcome will be bad for the majority. That doesn’t stop the Tories apparently favouring that feckless fool Johnson as a replacement for the intellectually inert incumbent of 10 Downing Street, incidentally a symbol of a morally bankrupt church. As Ali Smith writes, in her bleakly powerful novel Winter (2017): “What kind of vicar, what kind of church brings a child up to think that words like very and hostile and environment and refugees can even go together in any response to what happens in the real world.” From that unsavoury period as Home Secretary, sending trucks into immigrant areas advising them to ‘go home’, this PM has progressed to an international pariah, incapable of even orchestrating the sycophants  who normally aggregate around power.

One is obliged to remember that ‘Tory’ is a four-letter word, and not an identity proscribed under UK anti-hate laws. Unprincipled greed may be their creed, but hardly amounts to a political philosophy. Johnson’s legendary contempt for the truth – fired by both The Times (for lies about history) and his own party front bench (for lies about his own history of adultery), writing crowd-pleasing nonsense about Europe banning bent bananas for the Telegraph and, in a self-serving biography of Churchill, claiming he invented the tank, the RAF, the welfare state and the Iron Curtain (he didn’t!) – seems to be the principal characteristic qualifying him for leadership in the warped minds of the Brexit fanatics.

This addiction to ‘alternative facts’ (© Kellyanne Conway 2017) was clearly signalled over 50 years ago by the philosopher Guy Debord, in his La Societé de la Spectacle (1967), central to the Situationist International philosophy at the heart of the Sorbonne and other student uprisings of 1968. His view of a society transfixed by images created by the media, in contrast to verifiable facts, has been reinforced by the self-serving pathways of social media, making people massively open to influence by sophisticated algorithms in the Brexit referendum and American presidential elections. We have now reached an endgame in which the liars claim moral legitimacy on the grounds that they were once (2016) believed. That all of their lies then (£350m a week for the NHS, &c.) have since been exploded carries no value in a morally relativist universe.

My former colleague at Goldsmiths, Professor Aeron Davis, has tracked the demise of morality and verity in British politics over the last twenty years. Through 350 interviews, his 2018 book, Reckless Opportunists: Elites at the End of the Establishment, charts the moral decline of UK politicians from public-spirited democrats to self-serving opportunists. The skewering of national interest on the pikestaffs of opposing party factions, in both the Tory and Labour parties, is the inevitable apotheosis of this social collapse. Well-intentioned people say: “all will sort itself out, we will survive” etc., which is of course true. But if we fail to address the underlying failures in our system, things will only worsen. We have seen how impotent Westminster is, how humiliated we are now on the world stage, after centuries of unchallengeable hubris. Whatever the result of these eleventh-hour flailings and compromises, if we fail to address the systemic problems, we may well end up in the nationalist twilight now invading Hungary, Italy and Spain, where generations of the less well-off have embraced the fascistic blame culture. As I wrote three years ago, the Enlightenment is going out all over Europe.