Let’s call Dominic Cummings’ no-deal Brexit threat what it really is: a very English coup

We are staring down the barrel of a developing world-style power grab executed against the will of the people, parliament and two of the four constituent countries of what won’t remain the United Kingdom for long

Almost the minute Jeremy Corbyn was announced as Labour leader in September 2015, the phrase “a very British coup” hurtled into vogue.

Lifted from the Chris Mullin novel, it referred to the prospect of reactionary establishment forces conspiring to destroy the hard-left prime minister who threatened their shadowy dominion.

Almost four years on, the coup attempt in progress hasn’t quite been foreseen. This one isn’t targeted at Corbyn. In fact, he might secretly welcome it.

And far from being remotely British, one of its likelier side effects would be to end the union. This coup is entirely, repellently English.

Its intent is to circumvent whatever passes for democracy, and impose a no-deal Brexit on a people and a parliament which by crushing majorities oppose it. This much has been clear for a while. What was less apparent until today is the methodology that may bring it about.

According to Dominic Cummings, as quoted in the Boris Johnson no-deal house journal (more formally known as the Sunday Telegraph), it’s already too late to prevent the apocalypse.

If the Commons passed a no-confidence motion after 16 September, Cummings briefed No 10 staffers, Johnson would delay the date of an ensuing election until after the Halloween deadline.

As for the comforting idea that MPs could still outlaw no deal, Cummings dismisses that as cobblers. “The only person who can extend Article 50 is the prime minister, and he is not going to do that …”

If Cummings is betraying the Johnson form book by speaking the literal truth (and he probably is; these guys really aren’t bluffing), the scale of the crisis is worse than previously imagined.

By Cummings’ account, the Commons would have 13 days, after returning from its well earned rest on 3 September, to pass a no confidence vote. Failing that, the only barrier to the crash-out would be a late EU27 capitulation on the Irish backstop.

That might happen, of course. Anything might happen. I could wake up tomorrow with a six pack and a full head of hair. But the odds against that are about as encouraging as those against the EU raising the white flag.

All around the world, as a newspaper’s ghoulishly intriguing collation of global journalist opinion confirms, people are gazing at the fiasco in abject bemusement.

Each had always regarded Britain as a paradigm of democratic stability. None can quite believe the reality revealed crawling about beneath the paving stone once it was lifted.

Small wonder. However inured to the inherent democratic flaws you thought you’d become, this beggars belief. A prime minister elected to lead a minority government by 0.2 per cent of the populace is prosecuting a policy for which – with all respect to Dominic Raab – not a soul ever voted. To do so, he will ignore the 70-75 percent of the public who oppose it and a House of Commons in which barely a fifth of MPs support it.

If MPs cannot stop something they and their electors are passionately against, you might have to think about cancelling that “Parliamentary Sovereignty Restored!” banner for the street party on 1 November.

But can they stop it when that would take a level of focus, organisation and cooperativeness at which the opponents of no deal have never hinted before?

In order to do so, first, during that 13 days window, they’d need to pass the no-confidence motion. Factoring in that Tory refuseniks who talked big in the abstract may chicken out of sacrificing their careers, that isn’t inevitable. But it is the easy bit.

The hard bit follows. The Fixed-term Parliaments Act allows 14 days for someone to form a new government. Since Johnson could only do that by abandoning the no-deal swagger and destroying his premiership, on paper Corbyn would have the best shot.

But Corbyn couldn’t find the requisite numbers without striking a deal with the Lib Dems. Since he shows no appetite for that, a general election would seem inevitable.

Once that were called, it would be deja vu all over again: unless Corbyn formed an electoral non-aggression pact with Jo Swinson, a Tory leader neutralising Nigel Farage with all the no-deal sunlit uplands fantasy talk would go off a hot favourite against a fractured opposition.

You could waste a lot of psychic energy bemoaning Corbyn’s blindness, wilful or otherwise, to the extreme danger, and inability to break his addiction to tribal politics accordingly. Some of us already have.

And you could waste a lot more screaming to the wind about the complacent insanity of not having a written constitution, and so enabling a country’s future to rest on guesswork, opportunism and impenetrably arcane convention. Some of us have done that too.

But with the likelihood of no deal being rammed through so usefully clarified by Master Cummings, perhaps the focus should be on this: Whatever happens from here, on this day we are staring down the barrel of a developing world-style power grab. We are on the cusp of an exceedingly English coup executed against the will of the people, parliament and two of the four constituent countries of what won’t remain the United Kingdom for long. If it succeeds, as it very well might, on what imaginable basis could anyone regard this as any kind of functioning democracy at all?