This fantasy Brexit project, drawn up by half-arsed architects, has finally got the emblem it deserves

Ah yes, just what was needed, you thought, as the climate change protesters turned their sparsely thonged buttocks towards the chamber. More arses in the Commons.

By “you”, I think I mean me, my cousin Nick despondently sipping his Scotch in the armchair, and 11 other hypernerds glued by some odious compulsion to coverage of the indicative votes debate.

So enveloping is the fatigue that there weren’t many watching in the chamber. It was, at most, a quarter full.

Small wonder. In that fetid enclave of Hades beside the Thames, the climate never seems to change.

The weather does, and a mini-heatwave briefly thawed the glacial anticlimax when Nick Boles stormed away from the Conservatives and out of the Commons.

His party, he said in his epilogue as a Tory MP, cannot compromise. Bless you for trying, mate, but next time tell us something we don’t know.

But what exactly is it that we do know?

Even Donald Rumsfeld’s lurch into metaphysical free verse isn’t up to this. Categorising the known knowns, known unknowns, unknown knowns, and unknown unknowns about Iraq looks a doddle to a stupefied, terrorised nation of 66 million Manuels.

We still know nothing, other than that somehow, sometime, it will end. Although if “it” refers to the rancorous dialogue of the deaf, echoing in an infinity loop between public and parliament, we don’t know even that. The half-life of this political isotope could make plutonium seem dilettante. In 50 years, the air might still be toxic.

The Cabinet is in lockdown as I write, and tomorrow, who knows, the Commons may have another crack at deciding something. Anything.

But the game is now in Brussels, where the question is the same as here. How much more can they take? After the latest episode of House of Cruds, why wouldn’t the EU27 recoil from years and years of more of the same if even if some kind of deal is passed?

It needs only one to veto an extension, and Emmanuel Macron isn’t the only president visibly tempted. Lithuania’s Dalia Grybauskaite apparently feels the same.

To this it has come. A fantasy project drawn up by lunatic architects to restore our “greatness” may end with a tiny Baltic state shoving this septic isle over the edge, into the studiedly ungrand canyon of oblivion.

Whatever happens now, even if sanity pays a belated visit to the last chance saloon with a viable escape route, let it forever be recalled that on this day, our fate lay in Grybauskaite’s hands. Intensive research for several seconds on Wikipedia reveals she is a black belt in karate. Those hands know how to deliver a lethal blow. Whether she has the balls to use them is another matter.

But speculating about the near future is too dismal an exercise in nihilistic pointlessness. There isn’t a chalkboard on earth wide enough for all the potential permutations leading from here to wherever. If there were, it would resemble some endless Rorschach test of splattered ink blots devised by 10,000 maniacs.

In the last few days, I’ve talked about it to two men of god; my (and John Bercow’s) rabbi of old and a catholic priest. Both believe in the power of prayer. But not for this. Divine omnipotence stretches only so far.

Political impotence seems limitless. This terminally flaccid system of ours begs in vain for a vasodilator to widen the veins and allow the blood to flow again.

Whether we leave, stay, or half and half, it isn’t worth stating that things have to change; that the reflex response simply must be a radical reformation of the system that allowed this.

Obviously, after such a stultifying practical tutorial in the dangers of its absence, we need a written constitution. The opposite of a written constitution, as I hope is now clear, isn’t an unwritten constitution. It is no constitution. But we probably won’t get one.

Obviously, we need a new electoral system that prevents power, or in this case the illusion of power, going to a single party with nothing close to a credible mandate. But we probably won’t get that.

And obviously we need legislation to dilute the influence of media billionaires, and which ends the very British form of corruption that is their unbreakable grip – for all the rise of social media – on the political mood.

If this isn’t Rupert Murdoch’s baby, then an Australian-born naturalised American is unquestionably its midwife.

But we won’t get that. The lessons will be as blithely forgotten as those from Milly Dowler and Lord Leveson.

In or out of the EU, we are destined to stumble along, clinging to the zimmer frame. Whatever is learned will be quickly unlearned.

Here in the psychogeriatric ward of geopolitical life, a tired, broken, bemused old country sits in the high-backed plastic chair, soiling itself as it fitfully dozes in front of the Countdown clock to perdition.

That the patient came to resent all the splendid Poles and Portuguese willing to wipe its bum for minimum wage, and so fiercely that it wanted to chuck them out, is an indelibly tragic tale of national Alzheimer’s. And there’s no cure yet for that.

Perhaps I’m too bleak. Perhaps the surge of involvement and activism this has generated offers some hope that a new and better generation will rise from the radioactive ashes to take on the mutant rats.

But you get the politicians you deserve, and our apathy got us these. Showing them arse cheeks from the Commons gallery isn’t the answer. There appears to be no answer. Still, as a pictorial emblem of transcendent despair, that vignette will do nicely as our version of Munch’s The Scream.