I have a confession to make: I was approached by the people who brought the case in the high court over the government’s right to trigger Article 50 without a parliamentary vote. They asked me if I’d consider writing an independent opinion to be included in the dossier handed to the justices – and I declined. I can’t actually find the email I sent to them but the general tenor of my refusal was: ça suffit!

Whatever my personal views on the matter, the referendum result was unequivocal, and to attempt a judicially mandated parliamentary overthrow – or even a modulation – of Brexit-means-Brexit, would be to plunge an already fragile polity into still more turmoil. Do I feel small now the action has proved successful? Well, yes – but again: no. My suspicion is that my own confusion mirrors that of many NS readers.

For the record: I was a reluctant Remainer, voting in support of the status quo pretty much on that basis alone: we were already in choppy political waters before 23 June, and while I by no means believed all Brexiteers to be racists and bigots, I was pretty sure every racist and bigot in the land would be voting to leave. Nor was I that surprised when the vote went the other way: you’d have had to have been a very blinkered Briton indeed not to have realised how much opposition there was to mass immigration – and quite how effectively successive demagogues have linked this to the decline in real incomes and the growing gap between the cosmopolitan rich and the parochial poor.

After the result, I comforted myself with these thoughts: the European project was always predicated on the idea of “ever closer union”; and while I, personally, have never had any problem with a European state, to most Britons it has always been anathema. Moreover, the EU is looking increasingly unstable and will very likely fall apart in the next few years; under such circumstances it might well be better to be pissing on the burning tent from the outside rather than going up in flames. And finally: granted that the Social Charter and the incorporation of the European Convention of Human Rights into British law has been seen as an important guarantor of freedom and tolerance, are we so sure we’re incapable of claiming these virtues for our own? Do we really believe Britons to be inherently more illiberal than the French, the Germans, or the Hungarians, for that matter?

Our constitutional settlement is suffering from a bad bout of indigestion, not only at the macro, international level but at the micro level as well. With the Union of Great Britain and Northern Ireland looking quite as fissiparous as it is, is it any surprise that the invisible ink of our constitution has come under close scrutiny? Judicial impartiality, the exercise of the Queen’s prerogative, the free-floating sense we have of where “our” sovereignty resides – these are all debatable at all times, but the fact does remain that the coalition government never set out the programme under which the Prime Minister now wishes to proceed: there was no explicit abrogation of parliamentary sovereignty in respect of the electorate – and no foreclosure on the possibility of a judicial review of the executive’s power to unilaterally trigger Article 50. Under such circumstances, the high court’s ruling isn’t wilful or obtuse (let alone partisan), simply logical and just. The subsequent upchuck of bilious bigotry from the black bowels of our yellow press was only to be expected.

It has been bubbling up ever since the referendum result – but it has always been there; we simply tried to airbrush it out of existence with our talk of “diversity” and “respect”. No one on a low income, with few prospects for betterment, can withstand for too long being told by those much better off to exercise the virtues they need not, except cosmetically. Really, what we left-liberals fear is precisely what John Gray so elegantly limned in last week’s issue. Whether liberals of the right, promoting a New World Order of unrestricted free trade; or those of the left, trumpeting a new world-society in which mass migrations are factored by identity politics – our “project” has hit the buffers. “History,” said Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus, “is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.” His interlocutor, the bigoted unionist headmaster Mr Deasy, still believes in history as progress towards Augustine’s “City on the Hill”, and in this respect we’re both Deasys and Dedaluses, smelling the astringent coffee even as we bury our heads under the pillow.

We heard this desperate mental diplopia in the statements made in the wake of the high court decision by Theresa May and her ministers. In the Commons debate on Monday, David Davis yet again refused to reveal the government’s “strategy”. Well, it’s ça suffit! in respect of that as well. If this was a government of principled conviction politicians (rather than a motley crew that includes plenty of fence-sitting greasy-pole-shinners), we might be prepared to listen – but with no clarity in respect of the Brexit negotiations, there can be no clarity about the New Britain they will bring into being.

It’s not enough for the Prime Minister to decry the abuse directed toward the judiciary while “even-handedly” trumpeting freedom of the press – nor to claim her government will do more in respect of workers’ rights than recent Labour governments ever did. All this smacks of is tactics – not strategy – and we’ve all had enough of those during this long year of mendacious manoeuvring.

The time has come for Mrs May to write her own independent opinion, setting out with crystal clarity how she sees the way ahead. The impasse Britain finds itself in has been created, in part, by the unforeseen consequences of constitutional tinkering – Blair’s devolution, Miliband’s expansion of the Labour Party membership, Cameron’s referendum – and now there’s no way back to the future.

I wonder if Tom Watson and Paul Hollywood are the same person? I have never seen them in the same room together – neither in the devil’s kitchen of Westminster, nor in the heavenly Great British Bake Off marquee. Now the Parliamentary Labour Party is being forced to shift to the ­political equivalent of Channel 4, and the Cake Meister is going with. As with the Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn, so with Bake Off: the former presenters have departed, leaving behind the weird, judgmental, wrinkly old narcissist claiming the high ground of loyalty to the viewers – I mean members.

Is the analogy stretched, or capable of being still more elasticised? Dunno – but what I do know is that Bake Off is some weird-tasting addictive shit! I resisted watching it at all until this season, and my fears were justified. When I took the first yummy-scrummy bite, I was hooked even before the camera had slid across the manicured parkland and into that mad and misty realm where a couple of hours is a long time . . . in baking, as in modern British politics. It’s a given, I know, that Bake Off is a truer, deeper expression of present-day Britain’s animating principle than party, parliament, army or even monarch. It is our inner Albion, reached by crossing the stormy sound of our own duodenums. Bake Off is truer to its idea of itself than any nation state – or mythical realm – could ever be, and so inspires a loyalty more compelling.

I have sensed this development from afar. My not actually watching the programme adds, counterintuitively, to the perspicacity of my analysis: I’m like a brilliant Kremlinologist, confined to the bowels of Bletchley Park, who nonetheless sifts the data so well that he knows when Khrushchev is constipated. Mmm, I love cake! So cried Marjorie Dawes in Little Britain when she was making a mockery of the “Fatfighters” – and it’s this mocking cry that resounds throughout Britain today: mmm! We love cake! We love our televisual cake way more than real social justice, which, any way you slice it, remains a pie in the sky – and we love Bake Off’s mixing bowl of ethnicity far more than we do a melting pot – let alone true social mobility. Yes, Bake Off stands proxy for the Britain we’d like to be, but that we can’t be arsed to get off our arses and build, because we’re too busy watching people bake cakes on television.

It was Rab Butler, Churchill’s surprise choice as chancellor in the 1951 Tory government, who popularised the expression “the national cake” – and our new, immaterial national cake is a strange sort of wafer, allowing all of us who take part in Paul’s-and-Mary’s queered communion to experience this strange transubstantiation: the perfect sponge rising, as coal is once more subsidised and the railways renationalised.

Stupid, blind, improvident Tom Watson, buggering off like that – his battles with the fourth estate won’t avail him when it comes to the obscurity of Channel 4. You’ll find yourself sitting there alone in your trailer, Tom, neatly sculpting your facial hair, touching up your maquillage with food colouring – trying to recapture another era, when goatees and Britannia were cool, and Tony and Gordon divided the nation’s fate along with their polenta. Meanwhile, Mel and Sue – and, of course, Mary – will get on with the serious business of baking a patriotic sponge that can be evenly divided into 70 million pieces.

That Bake Off and the Labour party should collapse at exactly the same time suggests that the British oven is too cold or too hot, or that the recipe hasn’t been followed properly. Mary Berry has the charisma that occludes charisma: you look at her and think, “What’s the point of that?” But then, gradually, her quiet conviction in her competence starts to win you over – and her judgments hit home hard. Too dense, she’ll say of the offending comestible, her voice creaking like the pedal of the swing-bin that you’re about to dump your failed cake in.

Mary never needed Paul – hers is no more adversarial a presenting style than that of Mel and Sue. Mary looks towards a future in which there is far more direct and democratic cake-judging, a future in which “television personality” is shown up for the oxymoron it truly is. That she seems to be a furious narcissist (I wouldn’t be surprised if either she’s had a great deal of “work”, or she beds down in a wind tunnel every night, so swept are her features) isn’t quite as contradictory as you might imagine. Out there on the margins of British cookery for decades, baking cakes for the Flour Advisory Board (I kid you not), taking a principled stand on suet, while the entire world is heading in one direction, towards a globalised, neoliberal future of machine-made muffins – she must have had a powerful ­degree of self-belief to keep on believing in filo pastry for everyone.

So now, what will emerge from the oven? Conference has come and gone, and amateur bakers have banged their heads against the wall of the tent: a futile exercise, I’m sure you’ll agree. Will Jeremy – I’m sorry, Mary – still be able to produce a show-stopper? Will Mel and Sue and Angela and Hilary all come sneaking back, not so much shriven as proved, so that they, too, can rise again? And what about poor Tom – will he try to get a Labour party cookery show of his own going, despite the terrible lack of that most important ingredient: members?

It’s so hard to know. It could be that The Great British Bake Off has simply reached its sell-by date and is no longer fit for consumption. Or it could be that Tom is the possessor of his alter ego’s greatest bête noire, one as fatal in politics as it is in ­bakery, to whit: a soggy bottom.

A French friend, in town for a couple of days recently, was suitably and ­stereotypically bemused by our latest bad news about terrible crimes: Justice Lowell Goddard’s resignation as the head of the inquiry into historical child abuse was closely preceded by new results from the Crime Survey for England and Wales, according to which 11 per cent of the women questioned, and 3 per cent of the men, said they had been sexually assaulted during childhood.

“What is it with you British!” he exclaimed. “Of course we have such scandals in France, but they’re largely confined to the Catholic Church.” Then he predictably went on about “the English vice”, and how the old British establishment is composed of upper- and upper-middle-class men riven by sexual frustration because of their single-sex boarding-school educations. Under such circumstances was it any wonder they all ended up becoming paedophiles?

I bristled at this bowdlerisation; yet when I came to consider the matter, it did seem as if some explanation was in order. I concede I haven’t researched the matter exhaustively, but I am unaware of any other country in which a statistically significant sample implies that 7% of the adult population are survivors of serious abuse.

The Panglossian view would be that, as British society has liberalised, becoming more open and therapeutically aware, so victims of historical abuse have felt able to come forward; concurrently, the police have become better trained in such matters, and more committed to seeking justice.

But unfortunately we have no evidence whatsoever that we are living in the best of all possible worlds – on the contrary, it is difficult to escape the conclusion that this is a pretty scuzzy world. After all, what could be more morally dubious than announcing a great clearing of the Augean stables and then proceeding to dump a whole load more ordure on the heads of those who have already suffered?

The idea that a Kiwi lawyer can swan over here and pick up rather more than £300,000 for rather less than a year of futile “inquiries” is infuriating even if you have no personal stake. At least the criticism Lowell Goddard was facing related to personal rather than institutional peccancy: those that preceded her – Elizabeth Butler-Sloss and Fiona Woolf – were compelled to go because they were personifications of the very knotted establishment they sought to unpick. Their first investigation needed to be into themselves.

Which leads us back to the high prevalence of child abuse in Britain. I was a child in the 1970s, and have, in recent years, watched as the sunny uplands of my recall are darkened by successive revelations of widespread, institutionally engrafted child abuse. If I want to infuriate my own children, I have only to summon up this redundant cliché about the recent past: “It was an innocent era.”

But I do still think the Seventies were innocent in this sense: the seismic waves were rippling out from the sexy Sixties, but people were completely naive when it came to both the politics and the morals of greater promiscuity. Second-wave feminism had hardly any traction on sexual discourse, and liberals and socialists alike made a specious equivalence between free collective love and free collective bargaining.

We were young idealists in a culture that dinned this into us: more sex = good sex. No wonder we were easy pickings for the Saviles and the Smiths. Though not as easy as the boys and girls who were in care, at boarding schools, or otherwise at the mercy of the men in authority, and the women who were complicit in their crimes.

The picture that emerges from the survivors’ evidence is of an organisational culture, in businesses, the BBC, local government and even hospitals, typified by a sort of surly yet fawning subservience. The famous disc jockey is visiting; give him a key and the run of the place. The local MP wants to come by late at night to talk to some of the boys; fine, let’s leave him to his own devices. It wasn’t necessary for anyone to turn a blind eye, because the corridors in these establishments were so labyrinthine that no one could see clearly for more than a few feet: minding-your-own-business was the shibboleth sealing everyone’s lips.

In a way, the pattern of institutional child abuse, with powerful individuals who bestrode the national stage being allowed unrestricted underage footsie at a local level, seems like a bizarre analogue of Britain’s equally labyrinthine local government finances. Ever unwilling to cede its tax-raising powers, Westminster retains a whip hand over councils, such that even the lowliest lobby fodder becomes a veritable nabob once he’s dealing with the little people, whether they be metaphorically or literally little.

The Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse has tried to steamroller its way into public acceptance by its appellation alone; but its capacity to interrogate Westminster meaningfully remains utterly unproven. For victims, this can’t help but seem like some deranged repetition: the first time they were sexually abused it was a local tragedy; since then, they’ve been abused again and again, and now it’s a national farce.

I wish I could have consoled my friend by complimenting him on his native system of devolved tax-raising powers, but in point of fact the system in France is just as Byzantine and centralised as our own; which is why, I suspect, there are a good many fonctionnaires out there still minding the business of powerful French paedophiles.

In a post-Brexit world, one in which we are supposedly committed to mending the fabric of our civil society, it seems to me the Prime Minister’s priority must be to make the inquiry she herself announced in 2014 truly fit for purpose – and if that entails some siphoning off of power from the centre, so much the better.

At the corner of the rue D’Hauteville and the rue de Paradis in the tenth arrondissement of Paris is a retro-video-games-themed bar, Le Fantôme, which is frequented by some not-so-jeunes gens – the kind of thirtysomethings nostalgic for an era when you had to go to an actual place if you wanted to enter virtual space. They sit placidly behind the plate-glass windows zapping Pac-Men and Space Invaders, while outside another – and rather more lethal – sort of phantom stalks the sunlit streets.

I often go to Paris for work, and so have been able to register the incremental militarisation of its streets since President Hollande first declared a state of emergency after last November’s terrorist attacks. In general, the French seem more comfortable about this prêt-à-porter khaki than we’d probably be; the army-nation concept is, after all, encrypted deep in their collective psyche. The army was constituted as a revolutionary instrument. France was the first modern nation to introduce universal male conscription – and it continued in one form or another right up until the mid-1990s.

Even so, it was surprising to witness the sang-froid with which Parisians regarded the camouflaged phantoms wandering among them: a patrol numbering eight ­infantrymen and women moved up the roadway, scoping out doorways, nosing into passages – but when one peered into Le Fantôme, his assault rifle levelled, none of the boozing gamers paid the least attention. I witnessed this scene the Saturday after Mohamed Lahouaiej-Bouhlel ran amok on the Promenade des Anglais in Nice – it was a little preview of the new state of emergency.

On Monday 18 July, the French premier, Manuel Valls, was booed at a memorial service for the victims of the Nice attacks – while Marine Le Pen has been making all the populist running, whipping up anxieties about the enemy within. For many French, the events of the past week – including the failed Turkish coup – are steps along the way limned by Michel Houellebecq in his bestselling novel Submission; a via dolorosa that ends with La Marianne wearing the hijab and France itself annexed by a new caliphate.

Into this febrile drama comes a new player: Boris Johnson, the British Foreign Secretary. What can we expect from this freshly minted statesman when it comes to our relations with our closest neighbour? There is no doubt that Johnson is a Francophile – I’ve run into him and his family at the Tuileries, and he made much of his own Francophone status during the referendum campaign. In Paris last winter to launch the French edition of his Churchill biography, Johnson wowed a publication dinner by speaking French for the entire evening. He was sufficiently fluent to bumble, waffle and generally avoid saying anything serious at all.

Last Sunday, I attended the Lambeth Country Show, an oxymoronic event for which the diverse inhabitants of my home borough gather in Brockwell Park, south London, for jerked and halal chicken, funfair rides, Quidditch-watching, and “country-style” activities, such as looking at farm animals and buying their products. Wandering among ancient Rastafarians with huge shocks of dreadlocks, British Muslims wearing immaculate white kurtas blazoned with “ASK ME ABOUT ISLAM” and crusty old Brixton punks, I found it quite impossible to rid my mind of the Nice carnage – or stop wondering how they would react if armed soldiers were patrolling, instead of tit-helmeted, emphatically unarmed police.

I stepped into the Royal Horticultural Society marquee, and there they were: the entire cast of our end-of-the-pier-show politics, in vegetable-sculpture form and arrayed for judging. There was Jeremy Corbyn (or “Cornbin”) made out of corncobs – and Boris Johnson in the form of a beetroot, being stabbed in the back by a beetroot Michael Gove. And over there was Johnson again, this time rendered in cabbage. The veggie politicians were the big draw, Brixtonians standing six-deep around them, iPhones aloft.

The animal (as opposed to the vegetable) Johnson has begun his diplomatic rounds this week, his first démarches as tasteless and anodyne as cucumber. No British abandonment of friends after Brexit . . . Coordinated response to terror threat . . . Call for Erdogan to be restrained in response to failed coup . . . Blah-blah, whiff-whaff-waffle . . . Even someone as gaffe-prone as he can manage these simple lines, but I very much doubt he will be able to produce rhetorical flourishes as powerful as his hero’s. In The Churchill Factor: How One Man Made History, Johnson writes of Winnie overcoming “his stammer and his depression and his ­appalling father to become the greatest living Englishman”. Well, I’ve no idea if Bojo suffers from depression now but he soon will if he cleaves to this role model. His Churchill-worship (like so many others’) hinges on his belief that, without Churchill as war leader, Britain would have been ground beneath the Nazi jackboot. It may well be that, with his contribution to the Brexit campaign, Johnson now feels he, too, has wrested our national destiny from the slavering jaws of contingency.

Of course the differences between the two politicians are far more significant: Johnson’s genius – such as it is – lies in his intuitive understanding that politics, in our intensely mediatised and entirely commoditised era, is best conceived of as a series of spectacles or stunts: nowadays you can fool most of the people, most of the time. This is not a view you can imagine associating with Churchill, who, when his Gallipoli stratagem went disastrously wrong, exiled himself, rifle in hand, to the trenches. No, the French people Johnson both resembles and has an affinity for are the ones caught up in the virtual reality of Le Fantôme – rather than those patrolling the real and increasingly mean streets without.

We all know the form: a Terrible ­Political Thing happens – and like many terrible political things that happen, it appears to have been caused by a combination of sheer contingency and human error. An inquiry is established to find out how far appearance conforms to reality (a philosophic question that has bedevilled thinkers for millennia, but let’s not dwell on that) and witnesses are interrogated to see if they either conspired or cocked up. In due course a Report is written comprising millions of words – and eventually (often after many years), it is released to be filleted by journalists in hours then reduced to two or three headlines, such as: “BLAIR EXONERATED” or indeed the reverse.

Unlike with Terrible Things in the domestic and civil sphere, where some sort of justice for wounded and aggrieved parties can possibly be achieved by criminal prosecution, TTs in the political and international sphere almost never result in such, for obvious reasons: jurisdictions are difficult to establish, “laws” are disputed, while enforcement is patchy and subject to realpolitik.

Anyone on the left who imagined the Chilcot report would definitively name the guilty parties, so leading to their indictment as war criminals, can’t ever have understood too much about the Britain we’ve all been living in. Perhaps that’s why it’s been Alex Salmond who has so vigorously pursued the idea: he doesn’t want the Britain we’ve all been living in to exist. Yet even if the British state is going up in flames, I don’t expect cosmic justice to emerge phoenix-like from the ashes. The purely coincidental arrival of the report and a major constitutional crisis in the same week should, however, give us pause to consider what exactly we’ve hoped for in terms of the Iraq conflict’s aftermath. By “we” I mean those of us who, on and around 15 February 2003, got it into our heads that the popular will – which took the form of many thousands chanting: “Who let the dogs out? Bush! Blair!” – was being flouted by our elected representatives.

Thirteen unlucky years later, with Iraq a failed state, its sepsis infecting its neighbours, anodyne British military boots still on its ground, and the British Muslim community widely and confusedly disaffected, we remain gripped by a free-floating fantasy that settles on anything – such as the Chilcot report – that seems to offer redress. What would we like? Why, the clock turned back, of course: the dead to rise from their graves, the maimed to be made whole, the dossier-sexers and the Dr David Kelly-outers to be arraigned, even as the entire political class that bought the phoney pretext for war hangs its collective head in deep shame.

What we don’t want to do, however, is examine the paralysis this fantasy has plunged us into. For the past 13 years there’s been no serious reappraisal of Atlanticism possible on the left; we’ve been too busy resenting Connaught Square’s most infamous inhabitant – a man who cannot pop out for a pint of milk without being accompanied by eight policemen armed with Heckler & Koch automatic rifles. And that’s the way we like it.

But holding on to a resentment – as the adage has it – is like drinking a cup of poison and expecting the other person to die. TB, who was in the frame for the TT even before the balloon went up, may look considerably older and have gone to Rome in order to save his eternal soul, but he ain’t dead yet. Meanwhile, the party he sidelined in the slipstream of his own hubristic ambition carries on knocking back the poison with predictable results. Since the EU referendum there’s been considerable soul-searching on the left – the trouble is, it isn’t our souls we’re searching, but rather those of the lumpenproletariat wot won it for Brexit. They may be deracinated “tribal Labour” – they could be altogether non-partisan; but they’ve emerged from the cracks and crannies of run-down northern estates to inflict this terrible wound on the British body politic. How could they have done it? We reach in our grab bag of hoary old epithets (the one we got “lumpenproletariat” from), and come up with “false consciousness”. Yes! That’s it – they must be suffering from a confusion about where their true interest lies, or else they couldn’t, in their millions, have made their exterminatory marks.

What about us? Our consciousness, I think, has been far more deceptive: it has prevented us from acknowledging the truth about all sorts of Terrible Things, such as our complete failure to push for a serious geopolitical realignment post-Iraq. In the run-up to 23 June, rather than espouse the positive case for a united Europe as a counterweight to the existing Great Powers, we, along with the political class we so poisonously resent, remained blinkered, with our heads still firmly rammed up the hegemon’s back passage. The late Willie Donaldson, in his alter ego as Henry Root, used often to opine, satirising the left-liberal position: “We’re all to blame.” And indeed, we are all to blame for this impasse; yet for as long as the possibility of holding someone else to account for Iraq remains, we can neither think clearly, nor act decisively.