The Republican reaction to Trump’s impeachment is a grim glimpse into Britain’s future

Tory MPs are even worse than their GOP counterparts – they actively chose Boris Johnson to lead them

For a ghoulish glimpse into the political future on this side of the Atlantic, hazard a glance at events this week in Washington.

In one respect, the impeachment of Donald Trump will be a macabre irrelevance. The verdict was in before the trial began. By a widely predicted score of 53 to 47, the senate has already acquitted. Since the requisite two-thirds majority to remove a sitting president requires 20 Republicans to switch sides, no startling new evidence (if any is allowed to be heard) could reverse the outcome.

Everyone knows what happened. Trump attempted to use a freeze on funding Ukrainian defence to try and coerce its president to neutralise the electoral threat of Joe Biden.

The 47 Democrats know it, the 53 Republicans know it, Trump knows it – despite his furious denials. Plankton on the sea bed know it.

The fact is so established and undeniable that his defence is shifting from “the call was perfect” to “stink as it may, it doesn’t qualify as impeachable”.

This show trial won’t have a discernible impact on the general election which Trump’s clumsy mafia squeeze was intended to wrap up. That will pivot on the familiar cabal of influences – the economy, the likeability of the challenger, ground games, tiny margins in key swing states – that tend to seal an incumbent’s fate in a country split down the middle.

But the trial will have a certain gruesome relevance to us. The cloying obeisance to their master of Republican senators will be a handy guide to the years ahead, when it will be perfectly mirrored on the Conservative benches.

From them, there will be no oversight of Boris Johnson. There is almost literally nothing imaginable he could do, personally or politically, that has the force to pierce the tungsten shell of self-interest.

While the political parallels between the US and the UK are usually striking, those of recent years have been eerily exact in both the general and the particular.

Generally, we have watched the twin-track progress of populism as it propelled clownishly malevolent television personalties to power. Specifically, we have seen all internal resistance to the cult leaders crushed or excised.

Republicans with a smidgeon of integrity have been driven from congress at the crowing of a dawn chorus presidential tweet, just as as David Gauke and his squad of refuseniks have been removed from parliament for obeying their beliefs.

Some who flattered to deceive – the odious Lindsey Graham there, the imbecile Matt Hancock here – sold whatever stood proxy for their political souls to sniff the apron of power. The intoxication morphed them from resistance leaders into noisy cheerleaders for the little monsters they had appeared hell-bent on resisting. Now they just flatter.

None of this should have come as a surprise to anyone, and least of all to Boris Johnson. Being an ersatz scholar of the period, he appreciates how the Senate of the early Roman empire caved to terror when the democracy they nominally existed to safeguard was dismantled.

With Nero tarring less pliable colleagues, and using them as torches to light dinner parties in the imperial gardens, they had a pretty decent excuse.

What excuse Graham and Hancock could possibly have is between them and their consciences, confessors, or analysts. History may grudgingly afford brutally dismissive footnotes for them and enablers of their type.

But however predictable, it has also been been oddly shocking for those reared in a post-war era, when core democratic values were more than verities to be trotted out while they were being vaporised.

In this case, to be forewarned is not be forearmed. If a country blessed with a legendarily resilient written constitution has so little effective weaponry against a madman, a country with none has nothing in the arsenal to restrain a rogue elective dictator.

If Johnson dismantles the BBC, and scraps restrictions against partisan political broadcasting, barely a voice on his backbenches will speak (let alone vote) against it.

If he continues to stall on releasing the report into alleged Russian interference – having faced calls of suppression – his MPs will justify that affront to lowest common denominator decency. If and when he permits its release, however damning it may be, they will line up to distort it.

Whatever he does to cement his credentials as the world’s top ranked Trump impersonator – savaging what remains of media impartiality; separating migrant children from parents; remoulding the civil service into a propaganda wing of government; atrophying judicial powers; importing American voter suppression techniques – they will merrily support.

These people knew him for what he is earlier and better than anyone else, just as Graham and Ted Cruz are on record knowing Trump way before he derided his oath of office.

In this way, our lot are worse than the Republican counterparts. They were audibly revolted by Trump until he was imposed on them by a movement. These Tories actively chose Johnson to lead them.

For the next four and a bit years, we are wholly undefended. We are at the mercy of the hope that Labour alights on a leader capable of winning an election, and then building effective barriers against a rascally demagogue.

God knows how. There was a time when many saw a written constitution as the essential first step to reviving a comatose democracy. The pantomime distraction in DC should disabuse us of that.