He’s not even prime minister yet, and Boris Johnson has already lost his first House of Commons vote

If you want to know quite how a Boris Johnson government is going to go down (literally), it is worth noting that he is still a week short of becoming prime minister but, in a Westminster first, has nonetheless already lost his first House of Commons vote.

There is no other way of interpreting events on Thursday lunchtime, when no fewer than 47 Tory MPs all failed to do as they were told, and refused to vote down an amendment designed to stop Boris Johnson from proroguing parliament.

That’s where we are now. It’s mid-2019 and the big Brexit rollercoaster appears to have finally finished the slow, grinding ascent to its apex. We are just days away from whoosh! Freefall, cacophonic screams and, probably life-changing injuries.

It was dreary, procedural stuff, in its way. But that the House of Commons even has to dust down its dreary procedures to take pre-emptive action against a not-yet prime minister who they think is going to shut them down to get his own way should be a telling moment for anyone still labouring under the false hope they don’t live in a state that’s about to fail.

It’s an old and arcane term, proroguing, or prorogation. It means to simply shut down parliament, a course of action that is a familiar melody in various overtures to civil war throughout history.

And it’s a particularly hard word to understand when the country, or at least the Tory party, is very clearly pro-rogue. They’re about to make one their leader, after all.

And that rogue, crucially, is both pro-rogue and pro-prorogue. He knows he’ll need to find a new way of bending reality to his whim, because the last prime minister couldn’t do it, so they got rid of her.

She, Theresa May that is, did her duty and voted in favour of her own government. She couldn’t convince members of her cabinet to do the same, however. Six of them, including the chancellor of the Exchequer, abstained. The foreign secretary (chap called Jeremy Hunt), didn’t turn up either, then claimed, an hour later on Twitter, that he honestly, definitely, swear on the dog’s life thought he’d been excused. Ordinarily this would be an instant sacking, but Theresa May decided she couldn’t be bothered. This way, Boris Johnson would have to sack them himself.

Quite what the amendment will actually come to mean, nobody seems to know. It is quite tricky for parliament to actually vote against being shut down, rather like it would be for a rabbit in the middle of a motorway to vote against being run over.

But Boris Johnson needs a miracle. Now as then, and then as now, he knows and everyone knows that the House of Commons won’t allow the UK to leave the EU without a deal, it won’t revoke Article 50 and remain in the European Union, it won’t pass the deal that already exists, and the EU won’t change the deal.

Nevertheless, Johnson has repeatedly said the UK will leave the EU on 31 October, “do or die”. He has not been entirely clear who it is doing the dying in such a scenario, but we can be absolutely certain he’s got no intention of it being him.

Here was the House of Commons, saying it is not intending to die, either. As things stand, it does not appear to be a problem with a peaceful solution.