For desperate Remainers, there is a glimmer of hope: there is no British constitution

If the aftershocks of Brexit have unmistakably reversed the public mood, as narrowly expressed on Thursday, would a second membership referendum still be unthinkable? Without a written constitution, Parliament can do whatever the hell it pleases

Doesn’t everyone have the right to change their mind before the decree nisi becomes absolute? (AP)

How do you know for sure that you are living in a national madhouse? If the result of Thursday’s vote didn’t do the trick, try this. Within about 20 minutes of Tuesday morning’s Radio 4 Today programme, I was a) thrilled to hear from Jeremy Hunt and Kelvin MacKenzie, and b) feeling sorry for George Osborne.

Ordinarily, Hunt induces a reflex snort of contempt, Osborne entices as much sympathy as a pandemic of gonorrhoea, and MacKenzie’s mockney dulcets have the same effect on the stomach contents as gulping down a pint of seawater. But 'ordinarily', in case you missed it, has ridden out of town. In this Alice in Wonderland asylum, nothing is easier than meeting Alice halfway by believing three impossible things before breakfast.

So it was that Osborne’s tacit confirmation that he warned against a referendum had me wanting to wrap him in a bear hug, while I felt a surge of affection for Hunt when – admittedly in a blatant piece of tactical positioning for his doomed leadership bid – he advocated a second referendum about the Brexit terms. My only complaint, as argued below, is that he didn’t go the whole hog there.

As for Kelvin, he gladdened the heart by confessing to “buyers’ remorse”. His admission of an error by voting Out seemed so significant because this, as Hillsborough established, is no natural born apologist.

Having committed his blood libel against Liverpool in The Sun newspaper he then edited, he stuck to it long after it had been exposed as wicked falsehood. Kelvin would rather have his gonads strapped to electrodes in a Damascene interrogation cell, you sense, than admit he was wrong. Yet we find the lardy laureate of braggadocio sheepishly confessing to a mistake.

If MacKenzie is willing to broadcast that, how many less self-righteous others have privately concluded the same? How many more will join them if and when the scale of the catastrophe and the brazenness of the Leave camp’s lies about migration control and increased NHS spending becomes even more obvious?

So I ask this: if, in a month, sterling and shares are still weak and we are headed towards a brutal recession, if it’s clear that taxes will rise and public spending fall as Osborne reiterated would happen on Today… If these and other aftershocks have unmistakably reversed the public mood as narrowly expressed on Thursday, would a second membership referendum still be unthinkable?

If, by mid-August, opinion polling consistently found a ratio of 2-1 or even 60-40 for remain, would it be wrong to test that expression of the democratic will with a second plebiscite? Doesn’t everyone have the right to change their mind before the decree nisi becomes absolute?

All right, call me a sore loser (true: I, like so many of you, am sore to the point of screaming excruciation). Dismiss me as a deranged fantasist (also true: I assumed Iceland would be a doddle).

Tell me that reversing the result would cause an eruption of molten lava from less mannerly elements among the Out coalition (equally true: riot police would be deployed to estates. It would be hideous, no question about that).

But the question is whether it would be more or less hideous than accepting the horror of Brexit if, by then, some two thirds of the populace want to avoid it?

This next is a massively difficult question. It may be one of those unstoppable force versus immovable object questions that is incapable of any answer.

The dilemma for the House of Commons, as identified by the very great Matthew Parris in The Times, is which of two competing elements is paramount: obeying what last Thursday (if not necessarily now) was the democratic will? Or saving the UK from what some three quarters of MPs believe is somewhere between a historic disaster and a national cataclysm?

For years I have bored on and on about the need for a written constitution. Now, with opportunism worthy of Boris himself, I see the benefit of its absence.

In Britain, there are no rules. There is nothing written down that makes this referendum result definitive. Legally, it is non-binding advice which parliament may – at the exceedingly grave peril outlined above – choose to override. Those who care above all about “reclaiming sovereignty” would wish to remind you that the will of Parliament is, in fact, sovereign.

Without destroying an already fragile accommodation between the people and their elected representatives, the Commons cannot simply ignore the result. But it could – if demonstrations of popular feeling tarried with polls indicating a vast majority for Remain – introduce emergency legislation for a second referendum. Without a written constitution, it can do whatever the hell it pleases.

Nigel Farage slapped down the notion of a second vote by saying, “It’s not the best of three.” But why not? It’s those beastly Europeans who write down their rules. Here in Blighty, we make them up as we go along.

So if the evidence for a dramatic mood shift towards Remain should become overwhelming, why not make it best out of three? Why not delay the activation of Article 50 until a second vote on EU membership in October? Why not, if that was for Remain, have the decider two or three years from then?

This is not an Edwardian cricket match in which bewhiskered gents nod respectfully at the umpire who sent them back to the pavilion with a palpably horrendous LBW decision. There is no legal sanction against a Hawkeye review.

The consequences would be atrocious. It might turn the figurative, low-level civil war we see in so many substrata of society into a more literal one. Yet with all wars, as Orwell said, the choice is not between right and wrong, but between the lesser of the evils.

If you believe the lesser evil is stumbling tearfully into the abyss, knowing it to be a fatal error that a large majority no longer want to make, so be it. If, on the other hand, you think this is an act of self-destructive insanity, for God’s sake make your voice heard.

The only power that renders a second referendum unthinkable is that not enough of us are prepared to think it out loud.

It may be outlandish fantasy today, and the reasons for that are very powerful indeed. But as Leicester City and Donald Trump have demonstrated, today’s outlandish fantasy can become the prosaic fact tomorrow. Only a deafening expression of the popular will – on the streets, social networks and radio phone-ins, and in personal contact with MPs – has the faintest chance of hauling us back from the abyss.

We are at war with ourselves, and our future is at stake. This is no time to play by non-existent rules for fear of looking like bad sports to that minority (and it is the minority, however disproportionately loud its voice) of the racist, narrow-minded, retrograde and terminally insular.

We too want our country back. Do we have the guts to fight for it?