Barely three months ago, the work and pensions secretary, Amber Rudd, gave a speech in which she explained that “Being in a job gives a person dignity”. Does it always though, Amber? There is currently no job in the UK with less dignity than cabinet minister. Desperate people are doing things for crack rocks round the back of disused warehouses that are significantly more dignified than signing up to Boris Johnson’s decision to prorogue parliament, even when you said it was the last thing you’d ever do about 10 minutes ago.

So who are they, this prorogue’s gallery? In one sense, they’re anyone who hasn’t resigned when a minority government lies in order to execute this dick move – which is to say, literally all of them apart from George Young, a whip in the Lords who quit on Thursday. To put that in perspective, Young once reportedly described the homeless as “the people you step over when you are coming out of the opera”. So anyone who hasn’t walked from this government has been morally outclassed by that guy.

But along with Rudd, those who explicitly ruled out prorogation include the Saj. On Thursday night, the chancellor had his special adviser summoned to Downing Street by Dominic Cummings, then fired and escorted from the premises. Did the Saj watch manfully through the net curtains of No 11? Will he be the first to punch his own reflection in the bathroom mirror because he just can’t face himself? Or will it be culture secretary Nicky Morgan, whose former prorogation verdict – “clearly a mad suggestion” – should double as her LinkedIn biography?

Or Matt Hancock, who started his summer doing a leadership bid photoshoot with a horse, declaring “prorogation would mean the end of the Conservative party”? Look at him now. Look at Matt Hancock now. Has a chap in a V-neck T-shirt ever been so horrifyingly out of his depth? Matt Hancock is the guy in a Sky One drama about a stag weekend who ends up properly sobbing on a Cyprus cliff at 4am, as they tip a 5ft 8in polythene-wrapped package off it, screaming at the best man: “This is so fucked up! You said it was going to be fun! I’M MEANT TO BE GETTING MARRIED NEXT WEEK!”

And so to the best man. According to today’s Times, Cummings has ordered the government’s £100m no-deal public information campaign to launch next week, under the slogan “GET READY”. Apparently, Cummings “knows exactly what he’s doing with the timing of this”. When doesn’t he? Mugs and T-shirts bearing the slogan have been ordered for Whitehall.

Divulging this plan to the paper, a campaign source pants: “Dom Cummings is bringing a submachine gun to a knife fight.” Ooooooooooh! Is this supposed to be as swashbuckling as when that guy pulls a sword but Indiana Jones just gets out his pistol and shoots him? Because unlike seemingly everyone in Cummings’ Westminster orbit, I’m getting a flat zero reading on my frisson-ometer. Maybe it’s because the EU can bring a barrel bomb to the same knife fight? Still, tell me something, O anonymous briefer: when Cummings takes five minutes for refreshment in Whitehall, do a bunch of ministers whisper “Diet Coke break, girls!”, then rush to the window and fan themselves while watching him delve around in his ethical tote for another basic bitch strategy from Steve Bannon’s playbook? Because you all come off like you do.

All in all, there were very few bright spots in this dark political week. At least we haven’t seen Dominic Raab for a while. The foreign secretary is imagined to have been given time off to deal with the problematic contents of his lock-up, dispatched by Cummings with the words: “I don’t know and I don’t want to know. You’ve got two days to sort it. Shapps’ll help you.”

Elsewhere, the Brexit secretary, Steve Barclay, solemnly explained: “The car industry’s ‘just-in-time’ supply chains rely on fluid cross-Channel trade routes … We need to start talks now on how we make sure this flow continues if we leave without a deal.” Now? Just-in-time supply chains are a concept so simple and so widely understood so long ago that it probably formed the basis of a three-episode story arc of Postman Pat: Special Delivery Service in early 2017. Great to have you onboard the train towards a clue, secretary of state!

Steve’s fellow passengers include many of the alleged forces against no deal, who seem to have dimly realised the government is both shameless and ruthless. Yes, though some of them have spent a lifetime telling everyone the Tories are monsters who never stop at anything, it’s almost as if they forgot to tell themselves. For so many opponents of no deal – from Labour to some Tories to the Lib Dems and beyond – the politics of moving to make it impossible were painful, so they put it off till the absolute 11th hour.

They looked caught on the hop this week. I’m reminded of a Daily Show moment where Jon Stewart wondered at an interviewer asking George W Bush if he believed in spanking. “Does he believe in spanking? He believes in EXECUTING THE RETARDED. Of course he believes in spanking.” We can’t salute that terminology, but you get the point. Many of these people have spent years telling us that the government cheerily kill its own citizens with austerity. Put like that, it feels unlikely they were going to suddenly draw the taste line at using an executive instrument.

Perhaps the general getting-of-shit-together will happen “just in time”. And yet, perhaps it won’t. I hate to adapt a Cummings mug slogan, but maybe all sorts of people should have “GOT READY” rather earlier than they did?

• Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist