This was always a Blackadder Goes Forth Brexit – and now we prepare to go over the top

Johnson, Gove, Cummings: these are names that will be reviled for all time

It has been the grandest situation comedy of them all. Its hilarious moments too many to condense to a single highlights reel. Strong and stable. Nothing has changed. Chris Grayling’s ferry-less ferry companies. Chris Grayling’s fake traffic jams. The collapsing backdrop, the fainting policewoman and the top floor "technology lessons".

Hard Brexit, soft Brexit, smooth Brexit, red, white and blue Brexit. In the end, it was a Blackadder Goes Forth Brexit, and now we move towards the ending. We are in the trenches. The whistle is blowing. The laughing stops.

Some obvious joke about Dominic Cummings descending from Blackadder to Baldrick would be the obvious point. His final cunning plan has been to send out lengthy, deranged and, naturally, anonymous lies to journalists, to blame others for his own crushing failure and comprehensive inadequacy.

But he, Michael Gove, Boris Johnson and the rest are nothing of the sort. They are what they have always been: the psychotic, idiotic and degenerate frauds, miles out of harm’s way, insulated from the misery they spread by their own private wealth – precious little of which they’ve earned themselves.

It is hard not to see the events of Tuesday morning as the move towards the no-deal endgame. It is stupid to ignore its miserable consequences. A further crushing of economic growth, to go with the £66bn that has already been lost. A doubling of government borrowing to pay for the pointlessness of it all. Further rounds of austerity. A hard border in Ireland too.

The final round of the game has been to issue a mad, anonymous, 795-word text message to The Spectator, claiming that the UK will punish EU countries who seek to grant the UK an extension it will itself have to ask for. Absurd.

Then the government blamed Angela Merkel, by anonymously briefing out a wild interpretation of a call between her and Boris Johnson on Tuesday morning, and providing almost nothing on the record to clarify it. It has blamed the EU, blamed the opposition parties for legislating to prevent no deal. On the last charge, they claim the legislation “weakened their hand” in negotiations it has already admitted in private are a sham.

The idea that by fighting to shield the little lives of their constituents from the psychotic games of these vicious men, EU leaders and the British opposition acted in some way irresponsibly – it is shameful to even think it.

Donald Tusk, the EU Council president, had this to say: “Boris Johnson, what’s at stake is not winning some stupid blame game. At stake is the future of Europe and the UK as well as the security and interests of our people. You don’t want a deal, you don’t want an extension, you don’t want to revoke, quo vadis?”

Quo vadis. Where are you going? Where are you marching? Over the top into oblivion, that’s where.

On this dismal day, the only government figure whose face appeared in public was Michael Gove, called to the despatch box to give an update on no-deal preparation.

There is precious little irony left to spare to even mention that three years ago, it was he who stood up and told the nation, many times, that “the day after we vote to leave, we hold all the cards and can choose the path we want”. He said then that “maintaining the continental free trade zone is the simple course and emphatically in everyone’s interests”.

And now it is he leading and briefing on the terrifying no-deal preparations that he himself said could never possibly happen.

He may even have believed this stuff when he came out with it, hopelessly misguided though it was. But he certainly knows it is absurd now, and yet, carry on we must.

He only has one card left to play. “Far worse than the damage of no deal will be the damage to democracy of our failure to leave," he said. It is the second time I have heard him say it in a week.

Mr Gove, the damage has already been done. It is a straightforward con. You promise someone the land of milk and honey, you switch it for self-inflicted economic ruin, and then claim, with an almost straight face, that we all must suck it up to cover for your false promises. The government is the damage. It is all damage. There is nothing but damage to be had.

The way ahead is uncertain. If Dominic Cummings' demented briefings are to be believed, the plan now is for the Conservative Party (which he has never joined) to hold a people vs parliament election. To actively campaign on no deal. They will do this because they need to get back the Faragist voters whom they themselves radicalised by accident.

This morning, Leave.EU, the campaign group that has campaigned for no-deal Brexit for years, started doing its usual thing, publishing abhorrent adverts on its radicalising Facebook channels.

One of them was a picture of Angela Merkel. “We didn’t win Two World Wars to be told what to do by a Kraut," it said.

This is the point at which we move towards the end of the road. Economic misery and national humiliation, heaped upon millions of people, just so the Conservative Party can gain salvation from its own moral degeneracy.

It is a tale more abysmal than could possibly have been imagined, even in the middle of the night at 23 June 2016. Who knows what the future holds? In the long term, it is impossible to say. The country, ultimately, will not be able to move on until anyone whose fingerprints came anywhere near the year 2016 is long gone from public life.

But when that happens, three things will remain: Johnson, Gove, and Cummings – names that will be reviled for all time.