Boris Johnson has broken the Conservative Party. Now he wants it to win him an election

Johnson told 21 of his own MPs they had to believe his lies or he would end their careers. They refused to oblige him.

Ken Clarke. Philip Hammond. Dominic Grieve. Rory Stewart. Sir Nicholas Soames – he’s Churchill’s grandson.

These are just a few of the 22 people who can no longer call themselves Conservative MPs, at the end of a long, mesmerising day in which the Conservative Party was picked up and smashed down with devastating force upon the altar of one man’s terrifying ego.

Eeeuurrgh. The noise emanated from behind the despatch box of the House of Commons at 3.35pm precisely. It sounded like the death groan of a warrior goblin who has taken an arrow in the side and can fight no longer.

In fact, it turns out, it is the noise that a prime minister makes at the precise moment he watches his parliamentary majority vanish in front of him.

Eeeuurrgh. He was two minutes into his statement on the G7 summit, MPs were bracing themselves for a day of much anticipated drama, when something unexpected happened.

Philip Lee, the softly spoken, Remain-loving, Conservative MP for Bracknell appeared at the bar of the house, took six steps forward and veered to his right, not his left and took his seat among the Liberal Democrats, the party he was, at this unannounced moment, now joining.

Before this incident, the number of MPs in the House of Commons who are compelled to vote with the government was two more than those who are not. And with Philip Lee’s six short steps, it was now two less. A working majority of one, was now a minority, of minus one.

All this was only the overture to what would come later, which was, in no uncertain terms, the destruction of the Conservative Party, but we will come on to that shortly.

Lee grinned. Johnson groaned. The Lib Dems growled with delight. This was a defection WWE style. For a 48-year-old backbench MP, this is the closest you ever get to being Simon Cowell stepping out of the helicopter and seeing the 16 to 24s who’ve made it to boot camp go nuts.

From this point on, Johnson was a wobbling mess. He stood at the despatch box, swaying, rotating, gesticulating, hoping, perhaps even believing, that his own anaphylactic bloviation might paper over the cracks of his tower of lies as it collapsed around him.

If there had been any doubt about who was going to win this particular battle in the gruelling Brexit war, they were allayed now. Everything was coming down.

Johnson had been hoping his lies might hold. There are 58 days until Brexit, at the moment the only Brexit Johnson has managed to secure is one that comes with food shortages, fuel shortages, medicine shortages and all manner of other horrors that Brexiteers like to call Project Fear, but which is the government’s own analysis, and which the government is too scared to publish.

He was hoping to maintain, with as straight a face as he could manage, that his threat to inflict misery on his own people was propelling negotiations forward in Brussels, that a British prime minister risking his own people’s livelihoods for his own career was actually working, with actual sane people.

But no one was having it. Hilary Benn, Ken Clarke, Phil Hammond, they all stood up one by one, and they all cut through the bluster with tedious precision. What are the new proposals that have been sent to Brussels, the alternatives to the backstop? Will you publish them?

He wouldn’t, and there are none. He just jabbed his finger over the despatch box, muttering facile rubbish about, “Jeremy Corbyn’s surrender bill!” a drowning man, hopelessly out of his depth, reaching for the life raft of levity that, for once, wasn’t there to save him.

The gravity of the hour could not be lightened, the little lives of others could not be laughed away, though he tried. He tensed his neck, forcing strangulated half chuckles deep from the back of his throat and out through his nose.

He blithered and blathered. Ken Clarke had wanted to know whether the blindingly obvious was true. That all he hoped to achieve was a no-deal Brexit and a “flag-waving general election before the consequences of no deal become too obvious to the public”.

What he had by way of a reply was some high speed perambulating drivel about the 2001 Tory leadership election, spiked up with a bit of Latin.

That Johnson is a liar is a matter of public record. But the reason he has twice been sacked for it has never been clearer to see – he’s terrible at it.

So much of politics is about concealing one’s intentions, about deploying one’s poker face. The way to avoid a question you don’t want to answer is not to growl in tongues at the top of your voice and wave your arms like an evangelist preacher directing an airplane into land.

He managed an hour and a half before all collapsed yet further. News broke online that ambassadors from all the 27 European Union countries had been briefed that the Johnson government is actively moving toward no deal. It had given up trying to find a “legally operable” solution for the Irish border.

The bag had been transparent from the start but the cat was now out of it.

The bluff called, the game up, the wailing dying away. It was Boris Johnson’s second parliamentary day as prime minister. He may well have just two more to go.

There were standing orders, emergency debates, amendments and all the rest of it. There were procedural technicalities, votes on motions on motions on motions, there were all the impenetrable complexities that isolate and insulate politics and politicians from the people whose lives they control.

But there are also the plain facts of what actually happened, in what is, in the end, only a small old oak panelled room, just over the road from a card shop and a Caffe Nero.

Where, in the end, it came down to a simple calculation. Twenty one of Boris Johnson’s own MPs had made clear they did not believe his lies. That they did not believe there was a plan, that there was more going on, that a bigger game was afoot than getting the most devastating of all Brexits over the line and hoping for the best.

They had decided they would stop him from doing it – to make a no-deal Brexit a legal impossibility.

He told them they had to believe him or he would end their careers, and they decided it was a price worth paying.

Their faces were dotted around the backbenches, and when the moment came, none of them betrayed very much. At 10.03pm, the House of Commons voted 328 to 301 to, in effect, stop no deal.

Up on the backbenches David Gauke raised not an eyebrow. From Dominic Grieve’s thin lips, no traceable emotion cracked itself free. Ken Clarke’s mask of avuncular bonhomie has not slipped in forty years. It did not slip now.

Perhaps that’s because there is still a fight to come. If none of these people have changed their minds by this time tomorrow, there will surely be an election, though no one can be quite sure when. There are yet more machinations on that to come.

But whenever it happens, this is not a good start. Johnson will have to lead a party he has already broken. A busted flush, and the front man of a febrile mess.