If we must all sink to Boris Johnson's level, at least Ken Clarke is willing to stick the boot in on the way down

The PM is suffering humiliation after humiliation. And overnight, his mere presence has elevated Jeremy Corbyn to the status of a great statesman

It is well known that the Conservative Party is ruthless and vicious, with a lust for getting its own way and a sociopathic disdain for what must be crushed to get it.

All of which has never been more inconvenient for its current leader, who must now be wondering how wise it was to break it in two and set the other half against himself.

And it’s not even breaking it in half. What has happened is like the climax of a science fiction film: he has ripped out his own party’s brains but is now watching it grow fangs and lurch towards him.

It is hard to know whether Boris Johnson actually expects anyone to believe his absurd Brexit strategy – that taking no deal off the table ruins his negotiating strategy in negotiations that are not happening anyway – but Ken Clarke still took the trouble to give him the brutally short shrift it deserved.

It was all the more devastating for the avuncular air in which it was delivered. “I do think the prime minister has a tremendous skill in keeping a straight face whilst he’s being so disingenuous,” he said. He’s a liar, in other, carefully chosen, entirely parliamentary words.

The prime minister rolled his eyes, and contorted his face into a rictus grin, the same final defiant act of every other humiliated little schoolboy that has ever gone before.

Johnson’s first parliamentary week as prime minister has had a depressing air of déjà vu. For years now, the world has had to become accustomed to an American President who governs in lies. It has had no choice but to be dragged down to his level.

That is what is now happening here. Proper politicians, proper people, must be reduced to Johnson’s level. This pathetic notion, that negotiations that are not even taking place are somehow being undermined, that the threat of no deal is frightening the EU, yet is simultaneously nothing for British people to be frightened of, must actually be engaged with.

Clarke, predictably, was having none of it. He spelled out, in 90 electrifying seconds, why the whole thing was a sham. That Johnson seeks an election before 31 October, in which he can say has been “thwarted in achieving a fantastic, beneficial Brexit deal” and that only he can get one.

But nobody is falling for it. Not even Jeremy Corbyn, who by Johnson’s mere presence, has been converted to a great statesman overnight.

And Johnson is being outsmarted, at least for now. In two votes on Wednesday evening, the House of Commons stopped him taking the UK out of the EU without a deal, and they also declined to give him the election he wanted, on 15 October.

All the usual Tories could do was do what usual Tories do. They cried “frit” at the Labour benches, a word of Thatcher coinage and so the gold standard round here.

But they are not frightened in the slightest. They are just not giving Boris Johnson the Brexit heist he wants, which is to say, crashing out of the EU on 31 October, without the voters being able to do a thing about it.

Brexit: The Movie has been becoming an inviolable proposition for a while now, in the traditional three act structure. We have been stuck in the conflict phase for too long, with no twist coming to lead us to resolution.

But the Tory Party opting to eat itself alive might just change that.