So much for 'taking back control' - it's clear now there was no plan and Boris Johnson has unleashed anarchy

If you sent Private Baldrick on a four day crystal meth binge and asked him to come up with a cunning plan for the country’s future, this, real life, is a more excitable version than anything he could have managed

Boris Johnson speaks during a press conference at St Ermin's Hotel in London, where he formally announced that he will not enter the race to succeed David Cameron in Downing Street (PA)

So there was a plan after all. Cameron would promise a referendum on the EU that would definitely happen because he’d definitely win an overall majority and wouldn’t have to bin it to keep the Lib Dems happy.

Then his best friend would stab him in the back and join up with his arch rival and make sure he won but not by much but then actually he’d lose and they’d win and he’d resign and then his best friend’s wife would accidentally leak an email about a ‘Murdoch/Dacre’ plot and his best friend would stab the other guy in the back and almost out of nowhere the woman who actually wanted to leave the European Union but said she didn’t will actually get the job of taking the country out of the European Union even though the person who made it happen didn’t want it to happen unless the person who either did or didn’t want it to happen can get Murdoch/Dacre to make sure he makes sure it does or doesn’t happen and then all we’ll have to worry about is a self-inflicted recession, 800,000 job losses and the breakup of the United Kingdom which no one apart from 52 per cent of the population and Nigel Farage actually wanted.

This was the plan. If you sent Private Baldrick on a four day crystal meth binge and asked him to come up with a cunning plan for the country’s future, this, real life, is a more excitable version than anything he could have managed. It is as if three DVD players have all been attached to the same TV and we’re all sitting down and simultaneously Macbeth, House of Cards and Brideshead Revisited in all its disjointed, cacaphonic horror. A bad trip from which, as surely as the pound dollar rate, we will all have to crash out of in the end.

Whether Gove’s knifing turns out to be a Stop Boris Kamikaze mission cannot yet be known, and besides everything will have changed again in ten minutes, and in the meantime, Labour’s slow motion hari kari rolls on, as Jeremy Corbyn takes a break from organising rallies in his own name to telling the party’s own panel on anti-semitism that the state of Israel is just like Hamas, Hezbollah, the Islamic State and Al-Qaeda.

Things will have to settle down in the end, but when they do, this might - might - be where they are.

Theresa May will likely be the next Prime Minister. She ‘campaigned’ for Remain in the form of a single solitary speech, a course of action that is apparently unforgivable when Jeremy Corbyn does it but in this will probably propel her to 10 Downing Street. She says ‘Brexit means Brexit’ and there will be no general election, even though Article 50 can only be triggered via a parliamentary vote and only 150 Members of Parliament formally back leaving the EU. She will appoint a ‘Brexit minister’ to her cabinet, which could be anyone but it must be noted that Chris Grayling introduced her speech this morning. He is a man who has three equally bad after dinner anecdotes, one of which involves turning up to an EU meeting in Paris and being made to go in through the back door because no one knew who he was.

Whatever happens next, it’s time to move on from the lie about the £350m for the NHS. The biggest lie was the shortest. Take Back Control? This is anarchy.