Since liberals exculpate themselves from any responsibility for this situation, it is only to be expected that they should pin the blame on an ideological takeover on the right. My own earlier work may have played a minor role in shaping this curious view. In The Undoing of Conservatism, a pamphlet published by the Social Market Foundation in 1994, I argued that conservative thinking had become an unstable mix of neoliberal economics with cultural traditionalism. The effect of free markets is to subvert inherited ways of life. The restless mobility of capital and labour makes any strong attachment to a particular place or company dysfunctional. An unceasing stream of new technologies undermines life-long careers, while the privileging of choice in the market promotes a transactional view of human relations throughout society. Friedrich Hayek and his followers promoted an ideology in which economic life could be a vortex of creative destruction while communal, familial and personal life remained governed by traditional norms.

It was a fantastical combination, and something had to give. Conservative movements would fracture, some holding to doctrinaire free-market ideology and others embracing reactionary nativism, as has since happened on the American right and in European countries such as Sweden and Germany. In power, conservative parties would try to combine the two, but the balancing act would be difficult. The scale of social dislocation produced by unfettered markets would unleash powerful forces, which conservative parties and governments could not control. I did not suggest that “true conservatism” – if such a thing ever existed – could be recovered. Rather, I suggested that if conservative thinking was to have a future it would have to renew itself in a post-liberal form – one that renounced hyperbolic market individualism while securing personal freedom and social cohesion under the aegis of a strong state.

Since then, the undoing of conservatism has been completed by the centre right. David Cameron and George Osborne promoted a neoliberalism more extreme than any entertained by Margaret Thatcher. While Osborne oversaw an austerity campaign that ravaged core structures of the state – the police and the armed forces as well as welfare services – Cameron’s deadly mix of the Brexit referendum with the Fixed-term Parliaments Act has left Britain in effect ungovernable. It was these self-styled modernisers that led the country to its present impasse, and it has been the ultras of the extreme centre that have locked us into it.

Centre ground: Edmund Burke is venerated as a moderate conservative and anti-populist

The proximate cause of the breakdown in British politics is the extreme lengths to which the Remainer elite has gone in their attempt to derail Brexit. Hard Brexiteers also sought to derail Theresa May’s agreement because they wanted no deal; but most proved ready to compromise when the time for a final decision arrived. In contrast, for the haute-Remainers that dominate many public institutions there can be only one rational position. For them, Brexit is not a political issue but an eschatological struggle between light and darkness.

The haute-Remainer mind is an example of what the 20th century’s subtlest and most original conservative philosopher called political rationalism. Michael Oakeshott (1901-90) used the term to describe totalitarian ideologies such as Leninism and National Socialism, but he was clear that any kind of political tradition could succumb to rationalist ideology – including conservatism. (His own version of conservatism – an ultra-liberal variety, in which the ideal role of the state was that of an umpire – itself did.) The core of rationalism in politics is an idea of politics itself. Rather than being a practice in which people negotiate the terms on which they co-exist with one another, politics means the imposition of an idea. The idea is self-evidently true; anyone who questions it is ignorant and stupid, or else wilfully malignant. Though they claim to embody reason in politics, haute-Remainers cling to a view of the EU in which facts are secondary or irrelevant. They fulminate on the dangers of Brexit without ever mentioning that Paris has been convulsed by riots while Barcelona has become the scene of mass demonstration, burning streets and police violence. No mere fact can be allowed to cloud the vision of a sacred institution.

This kind of thinking underlies many of the absurdities of politics at the present time, on left and right. When the European Parliament’s Brexit co-ordinator Guy Verhofstadt praised the EU as an emerging empire at the Liberal Democrat conference last month, the assembled delegates could hardly restrain their enthusiasm. The dream of a future European empire supplies an alternative patriotism for progressives who despise the nation-state. In practice the European project has itself become a variety of nationalism, though it celebrates a nation that does not exist. The reality throughout the continent is the onward march of nationalists of a more familiar kind. Like much of the rest of Europe, Verhofstadt’s native Belgium is rotten with far-right movements, which his hyper-federal project would only further empower. Preferring not to face these realities, the liberals who cheered him are possessed by a grand idea.