Beto O’Rourke’s media outburst accidentally said everything about Brexit in a few short words

The Democratic candidate’s rhetorical question hasn’t been posed here yet – but it will feature in the retrospective inquiry into our national nervous breakdown

The definitive quote about Brexit arrived yesterday, though technically it had nothing to do with Brexit at all. Asked in traumatised El Paso what Donald Trump could do to prevent more atrocities at the trigger-happy hands of white supremacists, Beto O’Rourke lost his rag.

The former congressman’s campaign for the Democratic nomination has virtually evaporated, but it might just be revived by his splendid response to a stupendously dumb question. “What do you think?” he snapped, sensibly reckoning the answer – stop being a racist agent provocateur – too self-evident to be worth the respiratory effort of stating. “I mean, members of the press…” he added, “what the f***?”

And there, in a few short words, is that illuminating judgement on Brexit.

The same rhetorical question hasn’t been posed here yet, but in time, perhaps it will feature in the retrospective enquiry into this national nervous breakdown of ours.

We are, as recently observed here, in the midst of a coup attempt. It’s an unusual kind of coup, if not unique, in that it’s being executed by a government rather than against one. But any doubts about the brutal nature of this power grab diminished today with reports that Boris Johnson means to ignore any vote of no confidence, and continue as PM to ensure the crash-out on 31 October.

According to his de facto chief of staff, Dominic Cummings, Johnson will squat in Downing Street to facilitate the no deal that he seems to regard as less of a million-to-one shot than a prohibitive odds-on chance and his heart’s desire. It could alternatively be brinksmanship, designed to terrorise the EU27 into a capitulation by presenting the Halloween nightmare as unstoppable by any power within the UK. It may, as some optimistically suggest, be an empty threat.

But even if it is, consider what Johnson feels emboldened to declare. He is saying that the will of parliament – the keystone of a parliamentary democracy; the very thing Brexit is supposedly intended to make sovereign again – counts for zero if it diverges from his own.

If that isn’t a working definition of dictatorship, I’d be intrigued to know why not.

Whether he could actually continue if the Commons voted down his government remains unclear. That is quite extraordinary enough. No other country on Earth, developed or otherwise, could find itself marooned in doubt as to how a constitutional clash between executive and legislature would be resolved.

It is partly to avoid confusion of the kind – and the dangers it presents – that every other country on Earth, bar one, has taken the trouble to write down its own constitution.

Here, on the cusp of an epochal political and economic earthquake, academics and lawyers are wheeled onto the radio to debate the niceties – does our so-called constitution mean this? Might the Fixed Term Parliament Act imply that? – as if it were an arcane philosophical conundrum rather than a real and lethal threat to jobs, food and medicine supplies, and social order.

From the vast majority of the media, meanwhile, the silence is chilling. The prime minister is apparently preparing to treat the House of Commons with the reverence you’d expect Vladimir Putin to lavish on an unexpectedly disobedient Duma, and from most newspapers not a dickie bird.

This is more extraordinary still. It isn’t remotely surprising, because these are the newspapers that have been telling whoppers about the European Union for decades on behalf of their billionaire owners, all domiciled abroad, who expect to grow richer outside it.

But if the fact of this collusion between the majority of the press and its minority government isn’t shocking, its sheer blatancy is.

The mainstream US media is deeply flawed in its own way. Its pitifully misguided obsession with “balance”, as O’Rourke so gently hinted, leads it continually to pose monumentally idiotic questions like, “Is Trump racist?” The lowest common denominator duty it abrogates is to state the answer as incontrovertible fact.

But if Trump proposed mothballing the constitution, for example by seeking to ignore the 22nd amendment’s two-term limit and run for a third, not one mainstream American newspaper, liberal or conservative, would fail to go nuclear about that.

Yet here an elected politician is proudly styling himself as a wannabe tyrant, and there has barely been a dribble of outrage.

When this imminent madness has passed and the price for it is levied, the populace will turn savagely on the politicians who brought it about with their lies – or, in Jeremy Corbyn’s case, by doing nothing to prevent it.

But this act of self-mutilation would have been impossible without the endless distortions of the newspapers which collude in and propagate those lies, to further the sacred cause of petty nationalism and nudge their proprietors up The Sunday Times Rich List.

Their glib disdain for the truth and sneering disregard for the facts has defined them for a generation. Their indifference to a putsch against what with heartrending faith we call the British constitution reveals their dishonesty, rapacity and hypocrisy in crystalline clarity.

I suppose it is an act of hypocrisy, after railing against it above, to end with another question to which the answer speaks deafeningly for itself. But members of the press, as someone once put it in Texas, what the f***?