Whatever happens next, let’s bask in the schadenfreude of Boris Johnson’s well-deserved legal humiliation

As parliament prepares to get back to work after a surreal prorogation that ‘never happened’, the Supreme Court’s utter demolition of a cynical government is something to savour

Allow me to be the 1,273,793rd of Her Majesty’s subjects to say this: there has never been a day like today.

So startling were Lady Hale’s more original words, spoken on behalf of herself and all 10 of her colleagues, that her solo achievement has been overlooked. Let’s put that right, and congratulate the Supremes’ leader on becoming only the third person, after Anne Robinson and Mary Berry, to beat the ban on women aged over 70 starring on factual prime-time TV.

While the conspiracy theorists get to work on the sinister meaning of M’Lady’s spider brooch, the rest of us revel in ecstatic astonishment in the silken judgment she spun. Basically, to crystallise the legalese into terms dummies like me can understand, she relegated the parliamentary stasis of recent weeks to the status of Bobby Ewing’s dream in Dallas: none of it really happened.

The entire prorogation narrative arc was a fantasy – or as she put it, “void and of no effect”. Every bit as void, we might imagine, as Boris Johnson’s bowels became shortly after he was awoken in New York with the news that he had, if you’ll forgive the legal jargon, s*** the bed.

Even the legal experts who had anticipated the result never foresaw that it would be delivered with an 11-0 hammering. This is important. Had the justices decided the case 6-5, 7-4, or any tightish split decision, it would be much easier for the purveyors of choicest b*****ks to portray this as a fiendish Remainy plot.

Some will nonetheless accuse the Supremes of being the most felonious gang of 11 since Danny Ocean’s mob cleaned out the Bellagio vault. But with not a single justice dissenting, their prey will be restricted to a rump of the willfully credulous.

And so to the most frequent, pointless and inevitable of the standard Brexit questions: where next?

One assumes Johnson will fire his faux-prorogation “mastermind” Dominic Cummings, and also perhaps the sonorous attorney general, Geoffrey Cox, who gave the idiocy of prorogation his approval. One also assumes that Johnson will then cling to what little remains of his power unless and until the Commons removes him and installs an alternative government.

Whether the Brexit fundamentals will change in any substantive way is another matter, since what might feel like a meaningful turning point might be trivialised by the political aftershocks.

What has undeniably shifted is the mood. Psychologically, this feels like a different country than it did a few hours ago. The system, in so far as there is one in a constitution-free nation, worked. The antibodies in the body politic kicked in. The democratic immune system revived, and killed this amateurishly malignant stab at bargain-basement dictatorship before it had a chance to spread.

Two laws were upheld today. One was the bemusing daisy chain of case law, legislation and convention that establishes parliament as sovereign; the other was the even older law of unintended consequences. In trying to bulldoze through the thin partitions that confine a prime minister to an honour code of lowest-common-denomination decency, Johnson strengthened them immeasurably.

Whether or not his threat to prorogue for what we now know would be the first time this session is an empty bluff, no PM will dare attempt such a gangsterish stunt again after this one took such a punishment beating from the lustrous Lady Hale.

“Donnez-moi a break” was Johnson’s typically droll pre-judgment lurch into Franglais when asked if losing the case would cause him to resign. He will limp on. He may even spike a point or two in the polls from peddling his lone warrior against the establishment drivel.

But the Supremes lui ont donne a break all right. They broke the legs of his cocky disregard for the law in 11 places. They didn’t call him a brazen liar in so many words, or so few. They didn’t need to.

They smashed his blithe dishonesty to smithereens with a controlled, forensic savagery: no evidence offered, even in his own witness statement, of any need to advise the Queen that a five-week prorogation was required; no justification whatever for taking action with such an extreme effect.

There are heroes apart from and more heroic than the Supremes, who of course merely performed their function. Gina Miller, the QCs Jolyon Maugham and David Pannick, MSP Joanna Cherry, onetime Gordon Brown adviser Stewart Wood and others who brought and prosecuted the case ... their names deserve to be immortalised in the epic poetry of the age for sustaining the flame of natural justice and democracy.

It is hardly an inferno. It guttered alarmingly; for a while, it looked likely to be extinguished. But it burns yet, and if it doesn’t incinerate this grotesque apology for a prime minister, it has coloured him red with global embarrassment.

And now that we’ve emerged from the shower like Bobby Ewing and discovered it was all a nightmare, the soap opera melodramatics resume. Where the narrative arc of the next season will take us, God only knows. But fretting about that can wait until the morning, when the parliament that never actually went away returns. For a few hours, we are entitled to drink in the relief and gorge on the schadenfreude.