The revolution is being betrayed! That is the battle cry of the Tory Brexiteer ultras: that a dastardly counter-revolutionary assault on their sacred project is under way. Yesterday’s latest non-resignation by the Brexit secretary David Davis – having secured a time-limited backstop that the EU will never accept and that has no actual time limit – and his briefing against the prime minister for “Brexit backsliding” was the latest act in the Great Betrayal saga. That the Daily Mail will now be edited by a rightwing remainer rather than a rightwing Brexiteer has only added to the mounting panic. Then came the Boris Johnson leak: not only lauding Donald Trump and craving his approach to politics, but castigating the Treasury as “the heart of remain”.

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The Tory Brexiteers have dressed themselves in revolutionary garb, posing as insurgent Jacobins. “We have initiated revolution,” as Tory remainer Dominic Grieve bemoaned last year, “and the trouble with revolutions is you’re never quite sure what’s going to happen next.” Their opponents are “enemies of the people” and “saboteurs” and “traitors”. They claim the establishment is seeking to subvert the popular will. To be clear, I think it’s all nonsense – the Tory right are reactionaries, not revolutionaries, who wish to hand the economic elite more wealth and power through tax cuts, privatisation and deregulation. But by legitimising revolutionary rhetoric, they have helped the left more than they can ever know.

How can the Tories pose as bastions of stability and order against the revolutionary menace of the left? That was, after all, their traditional posture. They wove a national myth about British exceptionalism, rooted in the 18th-century philosophy of Edmund Burke, that Britain repudiated radical change in favour of moderate gradualism, unlike the hotheads across the Channel. This myth airbrushed out the tumult and struggles of our history, but it served a purpose: to portray the left as somehow un-British, as alien to the national character. But on both sides of the Atlantic the right has adopted a revolutionary style, posing as insurgents against a corrupt, self-serving elite.

Labour is run by genuine radicals, who want to end the 40-year-old neoliberal experiment and transform British society. Traditionally, the Tories would have presented this as a dangerous project that promised nothing but upheaval. They undoubtedly still will – but it can hardly pack the same punch, can it? That is no longer an option, is it? The Tory Brexiteers have not only made revolutionary rhetoric legitimate, they’ve made it almost compulsory in British politics. They have stopped the left looking dangerous, and so made a peaceful, democratic socialist revolution all the more likely. And for that, I suppose, we should be grateful.

• Owen Jones is a regular contributor to the Guardian