I continue to recommend re-reading Joseph Heller’s great novel Catch-22 for those of us who want to avoid being driven crazy by this Brexit farce.

As we are told that the cabinet is operating on a “war footing” and that frantic preparations are made for the austerity and hardship that would follow no deal, my mind goes back to the shortages I witnessed as a small boy during and after the second world war.

But they were not self-inflicted. The prospect of no deal is. In Catch‑22, Milo Minderbinder bombs his own men: “He had landed another contract with the Germans, this time to bomb his own outfit.”

There is no getting away from it: this is a rightwing coup. I agree with Ferdinand Mount, once head of Margaret Thatcher’s policy unit at Downing Street in what now look like less disturbing times. Writing in the current London Review of Books, Mount sees echoes of Mussolini’s rise to power, in that “yes, [Johnson] has come to power by strictly constitutional means”; it is what happens after that matters, and the do-or-die approach of Johnson and his warlord Dominic Cummings is truly disturbing.

As my former Observer colleague Neal Ascherson says in the same vintage issue of the LRB: “We have leading Tories – not only Johnson – apparently prepared to suspend a sovereign parliament in order to force through a Brexit meant to restore the sovereignty of parliament.”

In Heller’s tale, Minderbinder did it for the money. Most of this country is going, one way or another, to suffer financial loss if these usurpers have their way. I say “most”, but not everyone: there is a small clique of unpatriotic hedge fund operators who are financial backers of Johnson and who, like the spivs of the second world war, stand to profit from the chaos they have contributed to. They have reportedly profited by going “short” on the pound and making huge sums in the process – the current run on the pound being the financial markets’ natural reaction to a policy designed, in the former chancellor Philip Hammond’s phrase, “to make the country poorer”.

With the world economy losing steam, the trade and currency war between America and China could get much nastier

To less financially sophisticated Leave voters – if there are any still prepared to read this anti-Brexit column – I say, citing the old Chinese proverb: be careful what you wish for, especially as you contemplate the foreign-exchange cost of holidays abroad.

The media are now replete with speculation about how the Remain cause might be able to thwart Johnson and his gang. But we are told that Cummings has come up with the idea of a “people versus the politicians” election. This is a classically absurd phrase, not least because all the evidence is that there has been a slow but steady movement among the “people” in favour of Remain as the damage – current and prospective – becomes more manifest.

In which context I was delighted recently to meet a Cambridge undergraduate, Lara Spirit, who is a leading light behind a countrywide movement to energise the young in protesting against “the government’s intention of forcing a hard Brexit on our generation without our consent”.

By needlessly inflicting the referendum and all that follows on this nation, David Cameron has occasionally (and often not jokingly) been labelled “the worst prime minister since Lord North” – the man who is historically blamed for losing the American colonies. We now seem to have reached the stage where, in their obsession with the chimera of a satisfactory “trade deal” with Trump’s America, the present cabinet wishes us to edge closer to becoming, more or less, the 51st state.

Which brings us to the geopolitical implications of the current situation. It is becoming increasingly obvious that the foundations of the post-1945 era of economic cooperation – designed to counter the kind of economic protectionism and beggar-thy-neighbour currency policies that led to war – are finally vanishing, having long been undergoing a process of erosion. The present tariff and currency war between the US and China is, in the words of a seasoned observer of the far east, now taking the world into “uncharted waters”.

Conservative ministers have in recent years been trying to ride two horses – kowtowing to both Washington and Beijing. With the world economy losing steam, and central banks seemingly running low on ammunition to ward off the threat of a world recession, the trade and currency war between America and China could get much nastier. At the moment, the UK still enjoys the protection of European Union membership. Why on earth chuck it away?