‘Here we are, and the question is: where do we go from here?” Thus spoke one of David Cameron’s (and my) political heroes, after a crisis that bore little comparison with the ordeal that our prime minister has recently put us all through.

The speaker was Harold Macmillan, a true one nation Tory; Cameron claims to be one too, but he has often been sidetracked by the appalling, rightwing, Eurosceptical element in the party he has now given up trying to lead.

When I say “put us through”, I refer not just to the near-half of the British electorate – of whom your correspondent was certainly one – who voted Remain. I refer also to large parts of the rest of Europe, and indeed the entire world, who could not understand why this wretched referendum had been called at all.

We know the shallow, indeed base, rationalisation: he was worried about the electoral threat from Ukip, and made the mistake of thinking that, by conceding a referendum, he could also silence, or at least calm down, the vociferous anti-Europeans within the Conservative party itself.

Some hopes! Lady Macbeth’s eternal judgment was always going to threaten him: “We have scorched the snake, not killed it.” And, if he had delved further back into our prized European cultural heritage, he would have recalled the ancient myth about the “sop to Cerberus”: the warning that appeasement is never efficacious in such circumstances, because the monster always wants more to devour.

Now, it has become pretty obvious to students of Cameron that he just makes it up as he goes along. But being a man of considerable intelligence and first-class education, he will no doubt have known of Clement Attlee’s swift rebuff to Winston Churchill in 1945, when our wartime leader and prime minister suggested that there should be a referendum instead of a general election. Attlee dismissed this out of hand, pointing out that referendums had been the dubious, dictatorial resort of Hitler and Mussolini in the interwar years, and we should have none of it.

Attlee then proceeded to win the 1945 general election by a landslide, founded the National Health Service, and set up the kind of welfare state “safety net” that had been missing in the interwar years – and which, with a few grumbles here and there, was accepted by the postwar Conservative party, and especially Macmillan, prime minister from 1957 to 1963.

Macmillan succeeded Anthony Eden, who had himself waited so long to succeed Churchill that, when the latter finally retired in 1955, Eden lost the plot and indulged in the disastrous Suez venture of 1956. The Americans eventually pulled the rug from under him, by refusing to support the pound during the financial crisis brought on by the whole fiasco.

The Suez expedition was one of the most egregious misjudgments made by a British prime minister since the 1939-45 war. Tony Blair’s backing of George W Bush’s invasion of Iraq was another. And the calling of this referendum ranks pretty close in the hierarchy of monumental prime ministerial miscalculations.

The only remotely convincing explanation I have heard for this failed gamble is that Cameron was expecting another coalition in which the Liberal Democrats would let him off the hook of calling a referendum. Well, he routed his potential coalition partners and has proceeded to unleash Jacquerie-style forces that are way beyond his or anyone else’s control – but much welcomed by the likes of Donald Trump and Madame le Pen.

One of my oldest friends, a one nation Tory like Macmillan (and like Cameron in his better moments), maintains that, even if one voted the other way, it has previously always been possible to see why the “good old British public” voted the way it did in every election since 1945. But the good old British public has got it hopelessly wrong this time, and will pay dearly for allowing itself to be conned into thinking that the European Union, and immigration, are responsible for their undoubted unhappiness.

The causes of their winter of discontent are manifold and it is true that successive governments have failed to address the housing crisis or respond adequately to pressures on public services. But there is a difference between responding adequately and actually taking the knife to essential public services and exacerbating the reasons for that discontent – the legacy of George Osborne’s chancellorship.

Did they really believe that money retrieved from the EU was going to be spent on the health service? Why, the egregious Farage was already resiling from that lying promise within hours of his unfortunate victory.

Did they really believe that rightwing zealots such as Alexander “Boris” Johnson and Michael Gove were planning to reverse the austerity policies that have wreaked so much social damage?

There is an old Chinese proverb: be careful what you wish for. The British – or rather, the English and Welsh – have now got it.

Where do we go from here? I think, dear reader, that you have got my answer. But let me end with one last wish: that the Labour party finds itself a charismatic leader to take on these charlatans in the coming general election.