A Brexit coup could shift the balance of parliamentary power forever – but that doesn’t have to be a bad thing

An alliance between cross-party backbenchers and a Speaker with his eyes on immortality seems the best and perhaps only way out of the no-deal quicksand

From the moment Jeremy Corbyn became Labour leader, the title of his colleague Chris Mullin’s novel was destined to become a political cliché.

What no one foresaw back in September 2015 is that “a very British coup” would come to be applied not to a covert intelligence service’s plan to remove a hard-left PM, but to an overt move by a Tory backbencher to seize the power to legislate from a Tory government.

We are now on the verge of precisely that. The future is no clearer than for months, but a couple of lights are visible not too far ahead in the Brexit tunnel of doom.

Both take the form of amendments that may be tabled on 29 January, after the Commons votes down what Theresa May will market as her Lenor fresh Plan B, but will smell like the rotting corpse of Plan A.

Hats off to her for skipping through the Monty Python sketch book as if it were a field of wheat. But if the limbless knight’s “it’s just a flesh wound” didn’t work for her, insisting that her dead parrot deal lives on is hardly a banker either.

The only part of the vehicle she has rolled and totalled that still works, and better than ever, are the hazard lights. The danger signs flash brighter with every tick of the doomsday clock towards 11pm on 29 March when, as it stands, Britain will depart the EU without a deal.

Defiantly stating “this will not stand”, like the Dude after the thug pees on his rug in The Big Lebowski, is not a solution. Nor is assuming that the consuming monstrosity of an outcome makes it a logical impossibility. Logic checked out of Brexitville, if you hadn’t noticed, some time ago.

No deal will stand as the default result unless and until someone knocks it over.

With a government luminously incapable of governing, and an opposition led by someone stubbornly uninclined to oppose, that someone must be a backbench guerilla warrior.

It might be Dominic Grieve, who is reportedly in “secret” talks with John Bercow’s clerk of bills about tabling an amendment to kill the prospect of no deal. Or it might be the cross-party double act of Nick Boles and Yvette Cooper, who are working on something similar.

No member of this trio is central casting’s idea of a revolutionary leader. Grieve, the slightly effete and impeccably courteous former attorney general, is no more a romantic firebrand than Boles, his leading rival for the nickname Fey Guevara.

Cooper cuts an unlikely reincarnation of La Pasionaria, the resistance fighter against Franco’s fascists who said it is better to die standing up than live on your knees.

But this, if it happens, will be an ever more British coup than Mullin’s. It will be sourced in the lack of a written constitution, that most arrogantly British of oversights, which allows the rules to be made up at will; and executed by the elected representatives in whom the essence of our parliamentary democracy supposedly resides.

It would be so constitutionally legitimate, in fact, that it would be more like a counter-coup against a terminally split and paralysed government, led by a delusional inadequate with no mandate to burn her country to avoid burning her party.

This is not how it would be styled by the forces of reaction. Already, they are framing Grieve’s discussions with the clerk, Colin Lee, as a fiendishly anti-democratic plot.

“Dominic is now working to overturn the normal procedures of parliament,” observes Steve Baker, vice chairman of the sheltered home for imperial fantastists known for short as European Research Group, “in the cause of overturning the referendum result. I’m appalled.”

I’ve no idea where Baker’s been hanging out lately. But if he files a 230-vote defeat for his government’s entire domestic and foreign policy under “the normal procedures of parliament” header, it’s even money on an opium den in Laos.

The politician who imagines he strengthens his case by using the word “normal” in this situation, and hasn’t been smoking something stronger than skunk, wants looking at urgently.

So does anyone who shares the conviction of Grandpa David Davis and dunce’s dunce Iain Duncan Smith that the EU27 will cave to British demands at the last moment to avoid no deal.

The ultimate nightmare for us, as they have made crystal clear from the start, is nothing worse than a serious inconvenience to them. Brinkmanship is not a winning play when unilaterally deployed by the only side on the brink.

Whatever may come – an increasingly likely snap election, a Final Say vote, the adoption of Boles’ plan for something Norwegian with a better chance of flying than May’s parrot – nothing positive can happen until we pull back from that brink.

Whether a coup d’état against a PM unofficially channelling Louis XIV’s “L’état, c’est moi” would shift the balance of parliamentary power forever is hard to call. It would be a glorious revolution if it did.

A wretched system designed for elective dictatorship in stabler times, and capable of producing anarchy on this scale in these, needs radical and lasting change.

Then again, a country that fought a civil war to abolish its monarchy long before it became a menace on the roads, only to bring it back a dozen years later, isn’t lightly given to eternal change.

If and when the dust settled and the apathy crept back, the status quo ante would probably revive.

But the long-term constitutional questions can wait. For now, an alliance between cross-party backbenchers and a Speaker with his eyes on immortality seems the best and perhaps only way out of the quicksand.

Let the first unimpeachably democratic coup in global history begin.