You know when real Brexit betrayal happened? When the initial outrage took place? It wasn’t recent. It wasn’t Parliament voting against No Deal. It wasn’t Parliament voting for the Letwin-Boles amendment, or any of those recent disgraces. It was when our own Prime Minister Theresa May revealed in July 2018 that she had had a secret civil service unit working on the real Brexit plan (the ‘Chequers plan’) behind the backs of her Brexit department. That was one of the most appalling things a PM has ever done to this country.

And you know what was even more appalling? The fact that it barely raised a fuss. That was when I knew we were really in trouble. The media acted as though it was all slightly controversial at most. Most MPs shrugged their shoulders. Labour MPs made some party political noises, but didn’t really get fundamentally worked up about it.

And the media… the media just played it down. Even the supposedly right-wing press. A few columnists took her to task, but in general there was more mud flung at the hard-line Brexiteers than at May. There should have been daily editorials written demanding her resignation until she went, but it turned out that even for the media this was business as usual in our new Game of Thrones worlds. Her Cabinet should have tarred and feathered her and run her out of Westminster, but apart from David Davis and Boris Johnson, who resigned, the rest agreed it.

(Even now there are plenty of people who should know better who praise Theresa May for her determination. She may have her faults, they say, but she has commitment, and sticks to her guns. These people terrify me, for some of them are incredibly stupid and haven’t even noticed that Theresa May has all the morals and honesty of Bernie Madoff, or they’re partisan players who wouldn’t dream of praising someone like Steve Baker for showing determination because he’s on the wrong side. These people infest the political and media landscape like the wights from Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children, and need to be destroyed just like them.)

Anyway, it was at that point in mid-2018 that Theresa May and the Remainers realised just how much they could get away with. All those Remainer MPs who had previously said, through gritted teeth, that the referendum result had to be respected, we must leave the single market and the customs union, there can be no second referendum, and so on, realised that they didn’t even need to pretend to think all that. They could actually start talking Brexit down, and nothing much would happen, because the media would blame the ERG for any problems they caused, the civil service was fanatically anti-Brexit, as were the Universities, Parliament itself, and the government too, were full of fellow Remainers, the morally corrupt Speaker was doing what he wanted, and most local Conservative associations were too weak to do anything to them. That was when the spoiled children realised that the adults were no longer in charge, and Mr and Mrs Voter could be ignored for a few years.

July 2018, the month where the rot set in.