The symbolism of the physical state of the Palace of Westminster, where Parliament meets, was almost too crude this week. Big Ben was sheathed in layers of scaffolding and black construction netting. Great sections of the old complex were barely visible under plastic sheets. Inside, corridors were cluttered with plywood and temporary construction barriers. It looked like the scene of a disaster, which it was. Since Boris Johnson became Prime Minister, six weeks ago, he has replaced the grim, grinding Brexit strategy of his predecessor, Theresa May, with something much more kinetic and reckless. The British public, Johnson believes, is sick of the country’s agonizing departure from the European Union and want it over with, deal or no deal. Hang the consequences. Come what may. Do or die. Done. Kaput. Johnson was a front-man for the 2016 campaign to leave the E.U., and his calculation is that, unless the government meets its twice-delayed deadline to withdraw from the bloc on October 31st, trust in Britain’s political class will fall away completely. Much darker forces, like Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party, will fill the void.

Johnson is right about Britain’s Brexit fatigue. It’s a political fatberg: dense, kind of unspeakable, and blocking everything else in public life. But he is wrong about his authority over the situation. When Johnson entered Downing Street, he inherited a working majority in the House of Commons of just two votes, including the hard-right Northern Irish Democratic Unionist Party and a Brexiteer M.P. who is currently suspended from the Conservative Party, after allegations of sexual abuse, which he denies. Johnson sought to compensate for the lack of numbers by seizing the initiative. On August 28th, he sent three ministers to Balmoral, the Queen’s castle in Scotland, to ask her to suspend, or prorogue, Parliament for just longer than a month, starting by September 12th—the longest such pause in eighty-nine years. The idea, although Johnson disputes this, was to shut down any parliamentary resistance to his Brexit maneuvers, during the mother of all showdowns with the European Union. Whatever the plan was, it didn’t work. This week, on the first day after the summer recess, opposition members of Parliament used their own grasp of arcane procedure, with an instrument known as Standing Order 24, to seize control of the agenda. A coalition of the Labour Party, the Scottish Nationalist Party, and Brexit opponents of all kinds proposed a law that would prevent Britain from leaving the E.U. without a deal on October 31st. Crashing out of the E.U.—or at least seeming crazy enough to do it—is a keystone of Johnson’s negotiating strategy with Brussels. Johnson became the first Prime Minister to lose his first vote in Parliament since the Earl of Rosebery, in 1894. A total of twenty-one Conservative M.P.s, including eight former cabinet ministers, joined the rebellion. Johnson sacked them all from the Party and threatened to call an election. It was still only Tuesday.

It is hard to assess the change, and the damage, that Johnson is bringing to British politics in his first weeks in office. Among the Tories banished on Tuesday night was Ken Clarke, a seventy-nine-year-old former Chancellor and Home Secretary, who is known as the Father of the House, because he is the country’s longest-serving M.P. “Anybody who comes up to me and tells me I’m not a Conservative is plainly taking an odd political view,” he told the BBC. The following morning, Clarke took his customary position on the green benches of the House of Commons, a couple of places down from Antoinette Sandbach, another newly independent Tory. In between them sat Theresa May, smiling warmly. It was Johnson’s first appearance at Prime Minister’s Questions, the kind of impromptu parliamentary jousting at which he is supposed to excel. Instead, his answers were heavy and rehearsed. Johnson called the rebel legislation “the surrender bill” eight times and described Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour leader, as “Caracas”—a play on Corbyn’s supposed sympathies for Venezuelan socialism—a joke that he has been making for two years.

He did not mention the purging of his colleagues or seek a unifying tone. When a Labour M.P., Tanmanjeet Singh Dhesi, who wears a turban, asked Johnson to use his first appearance at P.M.Q.s to apologize for having used racist language in the past, he refused. Jo Swinson, the leader of the Liberal Democrats, implored Johnson to think again. “He is the Prime Minister of our country,” Swinson said. “His words carry weight, and he has to be more careful with what he says.” Johnson let it slide. When I was outside the House of Commons a couple of hours later, a Brexit supporter in a yellow hoodie was shouting “Snakes” at some pro-E.U. protesters across the road. Someone else was holding up a placard that read “Traitor Parliament.”

I’ve been covering Brexit for the past three years. This week has been particularly frantic and exciting—long days and the shallow, emptying feeling of adrenaline. Because it is British politics, there have been jokes, too. The informal coalition that blocked Johnson this week is nicknamed the Rebel Alliance and, on Wednesday evening, as another anti-Brexit protest got going in Parliament Square, the “Star Wars” theme was playing. But there has also been a sense of things—deep, quiet things that are part of British democracy—being broken that will not necessarily be put back together again. Despite Johnson’s setbacks this week, Parliament will still be suspended for thirty-one of the fifty or so days remaining until Britain is scheduled to leave the E.U. The shutdown is now the subject of three court cases, which are likely to be fast-tracked to the country’s Supreme Court, itself a novel phenomenon in British politics.

In the carnage, both sides are turning to extreme measures without regard for the consequences. Many Remainers celebrated this week’s legislation, which passed through the Commons in a single day, against the wishes of government. But it turned the British system of lawmaking upside down. In the House of Lords, Conservative peers threatened to block the bill—a protest they called off only at 1:30 A.M. Johnson has declined to commit to obeying the law, saying this week that he would “rather be dead in a ditch” than request another Brexit delay. Many years ago, the historian Peter Hennessy coined the “good chap” theory of government to describe how British politics—an ancient fudge of laws, customs, and unspoken hierarchies—properly functions. “The British constitution is a state of mind,” Hennessy said. “It requires a sense of restraint all round to make it work.” It wasn’t a week for good chaps.

Everything now points to an election, which is almost certainly what Johnson has been planning all along. Since he took office, there has been talk of a populist “People vs. Parliament” campaign, masterminded by Dominic Cummings, the former campaign manager of Vote Leave, who is one of Johnson’s chief advisers. It is possible that the current terrible atmosphere of confrontation will ultimately play into the Prime Minister’s hands. But nothing has felt certain for more than a few hours this week. Most polling suggests that an election this fall could return another hung Parliament, with the same intractable differences. What’s more, it seems unlikely, as of this writing, that Johnson will be able to hold a contest at the time of his choosing. On Wednesday night, his first attempt to call an election—for October 15th, just a few days before what is expected to be a climactic European summit ahead of Brexit—he lost by a margin of a hundred and thirty-six votes. But there will be more skirmishing, more ransacking of obscure parliamentary procedure in the next few days. The opposition parties won’t be able to resist the next big scrap for long. In the meantime, this week, during the bloodletting, good chaps from both sides have been quietly slipping away. On Thursday, Dame Caroline Spelman, a Conservative M.P. for the past twenty-two years, announced that she would not stand again, because of abuse and death threats arising from Brexit. That was a few minutes after Jo Johnson, Boris’s younger brother, who is a moderate Tory M.P. and a universities minister, said that he couldn’t take it anymore, either. “In recent weeks I’ve been torn between family loyalty and the national interest—it’s an unresolvable tension,” Jo Johnson tweeted. “#overandout.”

A previous version of this piece misstated Jo Johnson’s Minister of State role.