Boris's brother Jo Johnson has resigned, in the latest act of Brexit as low rent family psychodrama

Just when we thought we were out, they pull us back in. Which is to say the British public, who thought they might have been liberated from Brexit as deus ex machina for the resolution of internal Johnson family squabbles but no such luck.

Jo Johnson, minister for Transport, has resigned from the government via a blog post and video which reveal him, in prose, personage, self-regard and every other imaginable way to be a less bloated version of his elder brother. But that, alas, is where the Godfather metaphors must end, because the hierarchy is simply not in place.

Though the father, Stanley, is never knowingly not doing his best Brando impression, in the sense that his cheeks are unlikely ever to go more than ten consecutive seconds without being re-stuffed with a complimentary canape at London’s lowest rent celebrity party on any given night, his invitation having been secured through a carefree cannibalisation of the national-hate fame of his eldest son, he is, alas every bit the Fredo to his own children.

Within ten minutes of other son Jo’s resignation from the government, dad Stanley had gleefully accepted the invitation to appear on Sky News, shattering a Mitch Winehouse world record for shame-free dad-based fame theft once thought unbeatable, only to then describe questions about his sons and their rivalry as “rather trivial”, in a display of self-deluded narcissism of which it now emerges not one but two people on planet earth are capable (I’ll give you a clue – they’re both called Johnson, and neither has, in the conventionally understood sense, ever delivered the People’s Elbow).

“I support him,” father Stanley said, with a dimly concealed grin. “It’s not because he’s a Johnson. There are other Johnsons who have taken different views,” he continued, chuckling through the hilarity of global geopolitics as a jovial shadow play of his own family drama, this being yet another climactic scene in which the private dining room of a pub on the outskirts of Oxford has been trashed beyond repair. Who knows, there might even be a dead body in there, but the really funny bit is that this time no one's calling daddy to pick up the bill. The British public's got this one covered.

Sister Rachel has also weighed in, naturally. “Am hugely proud of my honourable and principled brother Jo who has put the interests of the country ahead of his political career,” she said, in what has already been interpreted as transparently veiled dig at her other brother, who has never done anything principled in his life. “Imagine what it will like at Christmas round that house,” the public seems to ask, aghast, yet simultaneously uninterested in the boring answer, which is that it will be the same as every year. Jolly japes, brandy butter, and the hilarious, never-to-be-extinguished truth that none of this actually affects any of them in any real way in the slightest.

The British people, Johnson Junior says, did not vote for “vassalage or chaos,” except for the fact that they absolutely did do that, and the suspicion now is that he is just the first of many a junior minister planning to resign, in the hope of securing a third “remain in the EU” option to add to “vassalage or chaos”, except that it will require voting for chaos and not vassalage to get there, and the overwhelming likelihood that chaos will not prove to be the bridge to remain but the ultimate destination. Oh well, at least the whole family will be coming along for the ride.