Meanwhile back at the ranch, Britain must choose a new prime minister – and fast. Donald Trump may have been elected by just 46% or 63 million Americans, but Britain’s leader will be chosen by just 124,000 members of a benighted Conservative party. And those members must choose between two candidates preselected by their party’s 314 MPs. This is like some kind of oligarchy. If they are so obsessed by “honouring a referendum” on the EU, why not a national referendum on who should be prime minister?
In reality, government by party in parliament has generally worked well and deserves respect. That a nation’s elected executive should be able to rely on a stable Commons majority is sound democracy, as any observer of America’s divisive constitution might attest. The current trouble is that the EU referendum shattered that stability. The Tories casually toppled Theresa May for negotiating what they knew in their heads, if not their hearts, was the only responsible way forward, a soft Brexit deal. They have now gone mad. All the candidates to succeed her are promising they can make pigs fly.
What happens next is unclear, since when 314 voters reduce 13 candidates to two, each of them bartering with each other for future preferment, anything can happen. That is the nature of oligarchy. But the most likely outcome is Boris Johnson and Michael Gove being offered to the members, and Johnson being chosen.
That is by no means the end of the matter. Unless Johnson softens his absurd belief in hard Brexit as the second coming – and he is capable of anything – he will suffer the same disloyalty from his own side that he showed May. He will therefore not enjoy the confidence of the Commons, which has persistently affirmed its refusal to contemplate a no-deal Brexit.
This will mean a bitterly divisive general election, with parliament contriving to engineer another postponement of Brexit for the time being. Given the state of the two major parties, that in turn will mostly likely deliver a hung parliament, in which Brexit might well collapse altogether or revert to a second referendum in any deal with the Liberal Democrats or Scottish Nationalists.
All this screams at the Tory hard-liners from the rooftops that if they want Brexit, they should resuscitate May’s deal and fast. Britain’s departure from the EU was a democratic choice. The manner of its departure was left to parliament, where it is now at the mercy of Tory oligarchs who have apparently lost their sanity. Grownups know that soft Brexit is the only realistic way forward. Increasingly it looks like that, or remain.
• Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist
