The end of the Brexiteers: Leave campaigners have rewritten the definition of a Pyrrhic victory

It is reasonable to assume ‘Take Control’ was not meant to describe a situation in which referendum victory would lead to the sequential self-immolation of each of its architects

Boris Johnson campaigning with Andrea Leadsom (right). Neither fancied being Tory leader (Getty)

The phrase Pyrrhic victory only exists because King Pyrrhus himself survived. Had absolutely everyone in his army right up to and including himself been killed at Asculum in 279BC there’d have been no one around to chalk it up as a difficult win to a passing historian.

There is no precedent for what must now be recorded as a “Brexit victory”. Not in the classics, not in Shakespeare, not the West Wing and nor in Game of Thrones has there been a win that is a crushing defeat for every last person involved.

It’s possible to feel sorry for Andrea Leadsom. When you’re the last person standing in a Mexican standoff played under Kamikaze rules, what choice do you have in the end but to deliver your payload upon yourself?

It’s worth a brief run-through the edited highlights of quite what has been unleashed in the three weeks since David Cameron stood on the steps of 10 Downing Street and suggested Britain needs a pro Brexit Prime Minister.

Boris Johnson sabotaged himself by failing to give Leadsom a letter at a party. Michael Gove finished the job but in so doing appeared so feckless his colleagues decided he couldn’t be trusted. Only Leadsom remained, but her stake in the nation’s future (granted as it was by her womb) turned out not to be large enough to withstand a newspaper interview not going the way she wanted it to and so, emerging from the blood and smoke and all-out carnage is a new Prime Minister who didn’t even campaign for Brexit to begin with.

Vote Leave’s slogans were explicitly designed not to mean anything – you don’t win anything in politics without abstract nouns – but it is nevertheless reasonable to assume “Take Control” was not meant to describe a situation in which referendum victory would lead to the sequential self-immolation of each of its architects.

Of course, we know the moment Vote Leave lost was when it won. Johnson was meant to use a 2 per cent defeat to Take Control of 10 Downing Street. He accidentally took control of the wrong thing.

Gove wanted to set about the nation with reformist zeal, the fact that reform would be rendered impossible by the unimaginable folly of his actions was an obstacle to be negotiated later. And Leadsom, well, she appeared profoundly deluded about what leaving the EU meant, telling The Times, in a moment of luminous stupidity overshadowed by the other one: “All we need to do is continue as before.” Which is the one thing we cannot now do.

And so we welcome our new Remain-campaigning, Leave-leading Prime Minister, Theresa May. In her campaign – if two speeches, of which one was rendered immediately redundant, can be called a campaign – one thing was made clear: “Brexit means Brexit.” She said it twice.

But quite what Brexit means still no one has any idea. All that’s known for certain is that 52 per cent of the population voted for something that isn’t Theresa May, and whatever it was has vanished entirely into the hills.

These are truly mad times.