Brexit is about to collapse, and already Boris Johnson and Jacob Rees-Mogg are running away from the consequences of their actions

The withdrawal agreement is not yet back from Brussels, and hard Brexiteers are already building a hard border between themselves and their own shame

The verb “to lobby” is believed to have its origins in the grand lobby outside the entrance to the House of Commons. For hundreds of years, this small, ornate quadrangle is where members of the public have been encouraged to come to ask their MPs for help, or to give them a piece of their mind – to lobby them and in due course, in all likelihood, be let down.

It’s arguable that there is no room on Earth with such a storied history of politician speak, of empty promises and transparent spin, yet it may very well never have lived through no more brazen an hour than at 5pm on Tuesday afternoon, when the hard Brexiteers summoned the TV cameras and started building a hard border between themselves and their own shame.

Downing Street has announced that a draft agreement between UK and EU negotiators has been agreed. It would appear to contain within it much that is unsatisfactory to Jacob Rees-Mogg, Boris Johnson, and everybody else who has spent much of the last two and half years lying about the fantasies of Brexit. The UK, it would appear, will remain in a customs union with the EU until such time as a better option is found, and Northern Ireland may remain in one even after that.

So down they came, to a hastily arranged news conference of sorts, to fire the starting gun on what already looks set to be the most shameful chapter of the Brexit story so far. Which is the people whose utterly shameless lies have landed the country in this unimaginable mess, seeking to put as much distance as possible between their actions and the inevitable consequences of them.

There was Jacob Rees-Mogg, saying that this deal will make the UK “not a vassal state but a slave state”, when the words he was looking for were, “Sorry. This is my fault.”

Several weeks ago, Mr Rees-Mogg called the TV cameras to a committee room in the Commons, where he waved about an utterly risible document described as the “World Trade Deal”. In the morning he’d claimed that crashing out of the EU with no deal and trading with the rest of the world on WTO terms would be worth “£1.1trn” to the UK economy. By lunchtime, he’d said he had no idea if that claim could possibly be true.

Faced with a choice between reality and taking ownership of his own outrageous lies, it is no surprise the latter should find itself beyond the pale.

Next there was Boris Johnson, to announce that, “This is just about as bad as it could possibly be.”

And he’s right. There will be no bumper weekly payout for the NHS. There will be no bonanza of free trade deals, with America, with Australia, with New Zealand, India, China, Canada and everybody else, because most of those countries have already objected even to the terms on which Britain is seeking to rejoin the World Trade Organisation.

There is just reality, a concept which, being the identical twin of the truth, Boris Johnson has never made even the faintest acquaintance.

If he thinks this is a failure on Theresa May’s part, there was, of course, not even a moment’s pause to reflect on whether any of it could be his fault. Not even whether it is his more than two decades worth of lying about the European Union finally coming back to haunt him. Theresa May, perhaps, might have fared better in these negotiations had she not lost her majority at the last general election. Whether she might have done better in that contest if her most high profile minister at the time had not spent the last year as a walking advert for government by rolling embarrassment is a question there is barely time to consider.

For some time now, the Brexit negotiations have been in Bake Off: The Professionals mode, and we are nearing the climactic ending. The UK and the EU’s patissiers have been squirreled away, constructing a 5ft-high sculpture entirely from spun sugar. And now, they must carry it to the judging table where, as heavily hinted at in the opening credits, it will suffer instant and catastrophic collapse.

In the Commons on Tuesday afternoon, the shadow Brexit secretary Sir Keir Starmer forced the government into publishing its legal advice on the withdrawal deal. So the coming days will not merely be a feeding frenzy as the withdrawal deal is picked apart, but the government’s own savaging of it, which it had hoped might remain a secret, also stands to become public knowledge.

There is, in short, no way out of this mess. The DUP will surely not stand for it. Boris Johnson and Jacob Rees-Mogg won’t stand for it. Even Jo Johnson won’t stand for it. Jeremy Corbyn, that supposed man of great principle, will not stand in the way of anything that might give him the keys to Downing Street, whatever the cost.

While Johnson spoke, Angela Merkel was in the EU parliament, ramping up calls for an EU army, as German chancellors have done with regularity since Helmut Kohl in 1988. It met with a predictable response from Nigel Farage, who managed, with infinite crassness, to reshape it as a Second World War-style German takeover of Europe.

The EU referendum of two years ago boiled down to little more than a straight fight: the economy vs sovereignty and immigration.

Sovereignty and immigration won, which means in the public consciousness they are imagined to be in some way settled. Since then, economic questions have dominated.

Were there to be a second referendum, sovereignty and immigration would come roaring back, and with the concept of democracy itself tacked on to them. Those arguments have beaten the economy before. They would make for even more formidable opponents if they were drawn into battle again.

For now Theresa May’s compromise is all we have. When it fails to survive contact with the liars and their lies, there should be no ambiguity whatsoever about who is to blame, however much ambiguity they try to insert.