In a striking column in yesterday’s Telegraph, headlined “Weep for Brexit: the British dash for independence has failed”, Ambrose Evans-Pritchard expressed his belief that Brexit has been defeated by its opponents. His verdict: “Britain will be bound and hemmed until the latent contradictions of such a colonial settlement cause a volcanic national uprising, as they surely must.”

Evans-Pritchard has a talent for dramatizing situations and that is unfortunate because his prediction of “a volcanic national uprising”, so far from being hyperbole, is the most realistic forecast published in the mainstream media of what lies ahead if the smug, narcissistic political class continues on its suicidal course of attempting to reverse the decision of 17.4 million British electors.

Tory Remainers, Labour opportunists and the deep state have combined to turn the exercise of withdrawal from the European Union into an incoherent nonsense. In the first shock of the referendum result Remainers dishonestly pledged to respect the democratic verdict. Two years of delay, dithering and spineless serial surrenders by Britain’s “negotiators” and Government have re-emboldened them to the point where issues conceded long ago are now being restored to the agenda.

The Single Market and Customs Union, both incompatible with sovereignty, national control of our borders and free trade, are now regarded as likely features of a final settlement. Except there will not be any final settlement, just an eternal “transition” period during which we shall have no control of our destiny, while shelling out billions of pounds indefinitely to the blackmailers in Brussels.

The EU apparatchiks cannot believe their luck. The British people called their bluff, opted to leave and won their grudging respect. Then the reptilian political class slithered onto the scene and set about selling Britain down the river. If EU commissars said, “Jump!”, the British response was “How high?”

The Brussels pond-life is not accustomed to such deference these days. Poland and Hungary defy the EU daily; Austria is in open opposition and about to exploit its term in the Council presidency to end open borders; the farmers of Slovenia despise the EU; Italy has elected a government that seems seriously to mean business about repatriating the tide of illegal immigrants to which Angela Merkel and Brussels subjected that country, and may possibly tear the heart out of the euro; the Czech Republic has just lined up to cause Brussels more grief; and most recently the migration minister of Belgium – Belgium! – has said that unless Brussels allows member states to close their borders “there will be no more European Union or Schengen area in five years”.

Note that those nations are part of the formidably united EU 27 that are supposed to confront Britain as a solid phalanx. After a day coping with that Tower of Babel it must be a pleasant change for Brussels officials to turn to pliable, servile Britain to indulge in some therapeutic bullying. It seems the one nation that knuckles its forehead to Brussels is the one that is supposed to be leaving. If we are not careful, “Brexit” Britain may be the last country still a member of the EU when that madhouse finally disintegrates.

What will bemuse future historians is the farcical pretext for the blocking of Brexit: the paramount, axiomatic, overriding necessity for a “soft” Irish border. When Messrs Barnier and Co first dreamed up this “Puckoon” comedy, they must have been astonished that the British government did not dismiss it as the transparent ploy it is.

The Troubles would return with a vengeance, we were told, if vehicles experienced the slightest delay, if a single jobsworth with a clipboard materialized, if anything suggested that two sovereign nations shared this border. In no time, our idiotic Prime Minister was parroting the “no hard border” mantra.

To resolve this imaginary conundrum a variety of impertinent and unconstitutional schemes were dreamed up, either cutting off Northern Ireland from Britain or subjecting the entire United Kingdom to the Customs Union and Single Market, to avoid inconveniencing Irish traders and travellers. This is madness. It also runs the risk of provoking beleaguered Loyalists, fearful of a sell-out to Dublin, into resuming hostilities – the very outcome Brussels claimed to want to avert.

It is not the “Irish border”: it is the sole, 310-mile-long land frontier between the United Kingdom and the European Union and, as such, it is essential it should be “hard”. Already illegal immigrants are exploiting this Achilles’ heel: if that border is not policed we shall have half the population of the Maghreb taking the Dublin-Belfast-London route to illicit residence in Britain. Is nobody spelling this out to Brussels and Dublin?

The origin of this sorry mess – representing the worst global humiliation of Britain in living memory – was the fatal decision to take the Article 50 path to Brexit. The trap laid by Lord Kerr, whose views on Britain’s position as expressed in the House of Lords are, to put it no more censoriously, distasteful to any patriot, has closed on politicians and negotiators. That does not dismay them: that’s the way they like it, since they are mostly Remainers.

The 15 destructive clauses from the House of Lords – representing an extravagant abuse of that chamber’s constitutional role – will be debated in the Commons next Tuesday. If even some of them are voted through, we shall have reached a tipping point. There will be no prospect of delivering what the British electorate voted for on 23 June, 2016. Anything that survives will be shredded by Parliament in its final vote on the Brexit “agreement”.

Then life will return to normal, in the dream world of the somnambulists on the red and green benches and their accomplices in the “neutral” civil service. It really seems they believe they can put down the Brexit insurgency of the Great Unwashed and resume normal service. That is the classic delusion of every doomed regime throughout history. The more probable reality will be Evans-Pritchard’s “volcanic national uprising”.

If Brexit is destroyed in Parliament next Tuesday, that will be the moment when Britain, for the first time since 1832, will find itself in a pre-revolutionary situation. That does not imply an immediate or early conflagration. Contrary to what is suggested by clips from Eisenstein films, history teaches that revolutions are slow-burning. They need not even be violent.

The defining characteristic is that, following a national convulsion, a completely different type of governance is put in place. Thanks to the purblind resistance of the establishment, which is now more hated than at any previous time in modern history, Brexit could become a double whammy whereby we not only rid ourselves of the EU but also of the existing political class. We shall find out on Tuesday whether the lemmings are beyond recall.