A general election is still the very worst way to solve this crisis

After years of unbroken dementia, the yuletide election might be the craziest idea yet to emerge from the labyrinthine birth canal of Brexit

Whether or not the Kremlin pleases to involve itself in determining the sovereign will of the British people, stand by for the Russian roulette general election.

Actually, that understates the danger to the tune of four bullets. In the traditional game, one of the gun’s six chambers is loaded. In this version, only one is empty.

After years of unbroken dementia, the yuletide election might be the craziest idea yet to emerge from the labyrinthine birth canal of Brexit.

This isn’t the first time I’ve expressed the thought, and it won’t be the last time you read it. But to spell it out again, in block capitals for the hard of comprehending… THERE IS NO SUCH THING IN THE CHARTED UNIVERSE AS A SINGLE-ISSUE GENERAL ELECTION.

The clue is there in the word “general”. What will be styled a proxy referendum will be nothing of the sort. Albeit unusually dominated by a single issue, it will be decided by the usual range of factors.

And it may not decide anything. There is a strong chance – about 50 per cent in the betting – that it will deliver parliamentary arithmetic spookily similar to today’s.

If so, what then? Imagine, if you’ve the stomach, that at 10pm and 20 seconds on the night in question, John Curtice’s exit poll flashes up: “Hung parliament: Conservatives largest party”.

Where would we go from there?

When you’re in hell, said the man Boris Johnson claims with tragicomic chutzpah as his inspiration, keep on going. What Churchill didn’t advise was descending deeper into it.

That will be the direction of travel if we land up with another minority Tory government. The new Commons would gather for ten minutes. By the time the house reassembled after the holidays, there would be several weeks until the next Brexit deadline on 31 January.

Without a healthy dose of acid, or with a potentially toxic overdose come to that, can you begin to hallucinate the Commons resolving the impasse that has paralysed it for 20 months and more in 20 days or less?

Assuming it didn’t, how confident are you that Emanuel Macron’s patience, already close to snapping point, would extend to another extension?

The trajectory would be a corkscrew spin. No deal might be unavoidable.

Also trading at about even money on Betfair is a Tory majority. In that case, Johnson’s surrender deal will pass. A granite-hard Brexit would permit Johnson, on behalf of the multibillionaire expat sponsors whose newspapers put him in power, to torch workers’ rights and environmental protections.

Does Jo Swinson trust this man with the NHS? Is she reassured by reports about secret conclaves between his government and US-based big pharma?

God alone knows what was in her mind, beyond rank opportunism, in gifting Johnson an election at colossal risk of delivering the diametric opposite outcome to the one she supposedly craves.

Corbyn is excused his belated support for the election. Once it became inevitable, he had nothing to gain from opposing it other than looking churlish, bemused and impotent, and he banked that trifecta long ago. Since the SNP’s ultimate goal is the independence made likelier by this election, their own opportunism at least makes long-term sense.

But Swinson? The Lib Dems may expect to recover a few dozen seats from the Tories in the south and southwest of England – but at what price next time round? It’s a terrible shame there was no recent precedent to warn her what happens to her party when it enables the Conservatives to indulge their most brutish instincts.

Again for amnesiacs, there is no such thing as a single issue general election. Caught in the crossfire between parties with simplistic Brexit messages, and with none of its own a canvasser could explain on the doorstep in a nanosecond less than nine months, Labour will necessarily campaign on other matters.

Its economic and social policies are broadly attractive, but its leader is historically unpopular and its messages are at grave risk of being drowned out.

This is not to discount the possibility that, in a six-week campaign against as grand a master of blundering disaster as Johnson, it will close the gap. Perhaps Nigel Farage won’t be bought off, and will eat into the Tory vote with the ritual cry of betrayal.

But if Labour somehow becomes the largest party (a majority will require a biblical miracle), or repeats the near miss of 2017, it will be in spite of its Brexit position, not because of it. The confusion and rancour division won’t be removed. It will be entrenched.

While a Commons majority can only go one way, potentially giving Johnson a “decisive mandate” for a hard Brexit/no deal on less than 40 per cent of the popular vote, a close result will turn on local issues as well as national and international ones.

All could hang like a Miami-Dade chad on a few dozen votes in a small clutch of marginals. The entire future – the relationship with Europe, the destiny of the NHS, everything else – might be determined by leaflets about dog-fouling fines and one-way traffic systems.

There is, as there has always been, one escape route from this monstrous maze. It isn’t perfect. It’s frankly awful. But the only logical, and much the least undemocratic, resolution to this nightmare is – or rather, thanks to Swinson, was – to ask the people a single question: have you collectively changed your mind about leaving the EU?

Perhaps Jo Swinson knows something no one else does. But if she hasn’t seen internal polls that convince her an election will give her what she most desires – unless bumping up her parliamentary numbers, and not avoiding Brexit, is what she really, really wants – she has loaded the revolver with five bullets.

The very best of British to her, and to us all, when the trigger is squeezed until it goes click.