Rory Stewart just might be the leader we need in the war against no-deal Brexit ‘by any means necessary’

If for nothing else, credit Boris Johnson with this. Within three days of taking power, he did what Theresa May could not in three years, and provided absolute clarity on this point.

Ladies and gentlemen, we are at war. It will be as short and brutal as its aftermath will be endless and excruciating, and it will end in one of two ways: we will either leave the EU without a deal, or not at all.

The big question today doesn’t concern Johnson’s intent. Palpably, he isn’t bluffing. He knows the EU27 will not back down on the Irish backstop. He also knows he cannot get no deal past the Commons.

With a by-election on Thursday and another Tory MP reportedly about to be charged with various sexual offences, he is potentially days from having no majority (even assuming that the DUP sticks with him).

Those two pieces of knowledge add up to one deduction. If he can avoid the dangerous general election for which he’s blatantly preparing, he means to goad the EU into doing his dirty work for him. He wants to set it up as the scapegoat for the horrors ahead by effectively kicking us out on Halloween.

So the grand question du jour is this. Who will step forward to lead the resistance, and fight him by any means necessary?

If no one does, and the enemies of no deal remain as diffuse and chaotic as they are, I think we’ve had it.

Whether he can avoid the election that would follow losing a no-confidence vote defeat is uncertain. If not, at this moment the smart money would go on Johnson winning it. He has his polling bounce, and a simplistic message so directly lifted from the Brexit Party that Nigel Farage would be wise to accept any ambassadorship on offer.

Jeremy Corbyn has neither a coherent message nor any discernible clue how to counter him. The Johnson who took him apart in the Commons on Thursday wasn’t the shambolic buffoon he anticipated.

Corbyn finds himself facing a sharply focused, alarmingly self-possessed nihilist-narcissist with the empty promise of redemption and a lorry load of cut-price opium for the masses.

In a catchweight contest, a strident demagogue will generally have the beating of a muddle-headed duffer who even now seems pathologically incapable of fathoming the shallows of his own mind.

In the parlour game of utopian politics, Corbyn would do the decent thing. He’d nobly accept that he’s the wrong guy to fight the no-deal exit about which he is slightly more ambivalent than the majority of those who elected and reelected him.

He would go with honour, having rescued his party from its putrid decline into neo-Thatcherite economics and patronising contempt for its natural supporters.

But in this dystopian nightmare, with no mechanism to remove him, he seems determined to stay.

If the leader of the opposition wilfully declines to lead the opposition, who will fill the vacuum?

Keir Starmer has the talent and gravitas. But his ungodly patience with Corbyn’s dithering (he makes the job look like Basil Fawlty during an excruciating eruption of piles) finds him in backroom negotiations with compadres from other parties rather than leading a rebellion within his own.

Understandably, after less than a week as leader of the Liberal Democrats, Jo Swinson remains an unknown quantity – and to 90 per cent of the electorate simply an unknown. She inherits both a party revivified by Corbyn’s stultifying equivocations, and the classic third party challenge of being heard above the din. You’d like to say that time will tell if she has the skill and charisma to lead more than her own gaggle of MPs. But time is almost up.

So it is, Rory Stewart, that a lonely nation – or about half a nation – turns its eyes to you. As Philip Hammond appears to agree, the former soldier/adventurer/royal tutor with the look of a disease-ravaged teddy bear is the closest thing the rebel alliance has to a charismatic MP.

It’s true that the end of Stewart’s campaign to succeed May showed room for improvement. Privately despairing of the idiocy and charlatanism of colleagues is fine. Rolling the eyes and whipping off the tie in disgust during a televised debate hints at the kind of intellectual superiority complex, however well founded, electorates tend not to embrace.

But this is hardly the moment to abandon the promising in the quest for the perfect. Of all the potential opposition leaders in view, Stewart’s charm, brains, honesty and cross-party appeal establish him as much the best suited to head the anti-no deal campaign under hurried construction by Hammond and his allies.

Yet however effective any such campaign is, it is at the mercy of a general election that will be a proxy second referendum. As things stand, the two sides of the argument are as evenly matched as in 2016, Remain’s deliciously symmetrical 52-48 advantage in the latest poll falling well within the margin of error.

But one side has an impressively ruthless new leader, a coordinated organisation, and a crystal clear plan of action. The other is rudderless, diffuse and disorganised. Somehow, in the next few weeks, someone must emerge as its public voice, and find the words to create a united, monolithic resistance which transcends party lines.

This is war to the death. The other side have their ersatz Churchill. Here’s hoping Stewart has it in him to be ours.