The Tories knew that they could never get this lucky again...

THE No Brexit Brexit is still in play. This formula, which we have long favoured in the Diary and whereby the UK seeks a Brexit which in the end looks remarkably like No Brexit, became more likely with Johnson’s big majority.

Yes these are volatile times, but the only sure indicator we have is that Johnson has sworn to his allies that he will look for whatever is the opposite of the No Brexit Brexit.

Which immediately shoots the No Brexit Brexit into the position of hot favourite — otherwise we’d be expecting Johnson to actually do what he said he would do, or something vaguely similar.

And by now everybody knows that that is not how Johnson rolls.

He can do whatever he likes now, and for most prime ministers this would mean that they choose the course of action that is least damaging to the country that they represent. Yes, that would seem to make some vague kind of sense, this notion that if one thing is obviously better than the other, in terms of prosperity and the common good and all that stuff, you go with the better thing — in this case, the No Brexit Brexit.

But of course other things are in play here, which make that concept of the common good seem like something to be viewed in a glass case in the British Museum.

Always it seems that the Tories are seeking some new variation on the theme, some elusive form of delinquency which you might call the “common bad”.

Indeed last Sunday, with Johnson leading the polls, we looked at the ways in which the bad guys were winning — and not just in Britain. And then last Thursday the bad guys won in a big way, bigger than even they had imagined.

They did it because the opportunity presented to them by Jeremy Corbyn gave them that extra blast of energy. Essentially they had no meaningful opposition. They knew they could never get this lucky again, and they filled their boots.

Not only did the bad guys have a brutishly obvious position on the biggest issue of their time, they were up against a leader who basically agreed with them on that issue, and who ended up with no position at all — so Johnson was the bad guy who would wake up every morning with the happy thought that there was no good guy.

And he could draw further strength from the force which is driving so much of this ugliness in the UK and the USA and other places too. A force that we know so well in this country, that of nationalism.

It is the lowest form of political life, the old nationalism — yet it was rampantly victorious across most of the UK, to the extent that it is hard to see the same UK surviving in any recognisable form by the time these forces are finished with it.

This surge of nationalism in a country which used to consider itself to be fairly grown-up should have terrified every commentator in every TV studio in these islands. But then one of the symptoms of the disease is that we can see clearly all the horrors of nationalism when it manifests itself in other peoples — while assuming that we have some special strain of it which renders us immune to all that.

Therefore in Ireland we look at the raw English nationalism of the Tories and of the demoralised underclass which they did much to create, and we pity them for the irredeemable eejitry to which they are in thrall.

And then in the next moment, with that stunning lack of self-awareness that the virus of nationalism brings, some of our supposedly smart people are tweeting about this result increasing the chances of a United Ireland, like they were talking about some lifestyle choice that just needed a bit of tweaking — like this is great gas, all the same.

But it will not be great gas — nor will there be much gas in Brexity Britain, given that its nationalist project is now being led by a man who is known to have no functioning sense of right and wrong. And who has thrived in a political culture which has enabled that descent into darkness.

Indeed, the defining line of this era was not about Johnson but about his old Etonian chum David Cameron, of whom it was written (by the brilliant Frankie Boyle) that he was “a sort of bored viceroy engaged in the handover of power from governments to corporations”.

This is how it works now, this abandonment of the public realm by a class of ambitious insiders in politics and the media, obsessed only with the management of their own careers. With their endless cynicism and their awful hackery, they have cleared the way for a Johnson or a Trump — for men with no boundaries.

And they have left what used to be known as the “working class” with even fewer options than they already had, no pride left in them except this garbled Englishness.

So it wasn’t just the rich Tories waking up to the realisation that in this war they only had to beat Jeremy Corbyn. All across England they knew there was no good guy, and they’ve known it for some time.

‘Johnson was the bad guy with the happy thought that there was no good guy against him...’