Like an enraged bull charging a matador, the British right is putting its head down and stampeding towards a no-deal Brexit. It has to keep moving. Were it to stop and consider where it was heading, it would never take the risks it is taking with Britain’s future.

The left fails so often because it thinks it is enough to hate Conservatives and say they are wicked, rather than understand Conservatives and show them to be dangerous. I cannot emphasise strongly enough that on its own terms the right ought to know that a no-deal Brexit is an act of epic folly and that Boris Johnson’s talk of a new golden age for merrie England is as much bullshit as bullish: the drivel of a man and a movement that have nothing but empty bravado to sustain them.

If Tories meant what they said, they would not govern as they do. They believe that the civil service has failed the country. Yet they assure the public that same civil service can complete the most complicated operation Britain has attempted since D-Day. They believe that markets possess more knowledge than the state. Yet they ignore the warnings from the currency markets that Brexit could push us into a sterling crisis. They deride the conformism of millennial snowflakes and the mindlessness of the Corbyn cult. Yet they are the upholders of an ideology in which reasonable doubt has become as heretical as denying the divinity of Christ.

Dominic Cummings, Boris Johnson’s chief of staff, at Downing Street on 2 August 2019. Photograph: Tolga Akmen/AFP/Getty Images

Like Jordan Peterson or Noam Chomsky, Dominic Cummings specialises in sweeping assertions that fall apart when you ask that simplest of questions: “So what should we do?” You won’t find coherent answers in the series of polemics he wrote before he joined Johnson in Downing Street. Thinkers in the Cummings style are performers who play to their audiences’ prejudices. They cover the play-acting with a cloak of learned references so their listeners can pretend they are hearing something more substantial than pub talk.

Cummings appeals to two Conservative prejudices: EU membership cripples Britain and the state bureaucracy is filled with incompetent time-servers. “Duff people are promoted to the most senior roles and the thousands of able people leave,” Cummings says of Whitehall. Although many find it possible to damn Brussels in one breath and the public sector in the next – indeed, if you add the damning of immigration, you have the sum of what passes for conversation in Tory circles – it is impossible for a serious man or woman to hold both beliefs simultaneously.

Brexit must lead to an explosion of investment in and reliance on the Whitehall bureaucrats the right despises as time-wasters. The Institute of Government reports that at least 16,000 officials will be working on Brexit by the autumn and numbers are likely to rise after no deal. Whitehall will have to impose direct rule on Northern Ireland as the dilettantes of the right unravel the Irish peace process. A long-term shift towards corporatism seems to me to be inevitable. The answer to the question: “So what should we do?” can only be to increase the power of the state to help struggling businesses, manage the tensions in the union and strike a trade deal with the EU that will be far harder to negotiate once we are pleading for help from the outside.

There is not the time to recruit and train staff if the British bull is to crash into the Halloween deadline

As it is, Tories who once said there was no magic money tree behave as if they have discovered an enchanted forest where notes flutter down to the state’s coffers like autumn leaves. For propaganda purposes, they are conning the country that the hundreds of millions they are spending on no-deal preparations are an emergency measure. They pretend Brexit is like a freak storm. If we are prepared, we can “get through it” and then stride on to the bright Johnsonian uplands. It’s not just that Conservatives and Faragists don’t tell the public Brexit will trap Britain in a rolling crisis that will continue well into the 2020s – and that the harder the Brexit is the deeper the crisis will be. It’s that, as the chair of the public accounts committee said, the spending splurge is all for show. There is not the time to recruit and train staff if the British bull is to crash into the Halloween deadline.

The pieces Cummings wrote between working for Michael Gove, running the Vote Leave campaign and going to Downing Street are peppered with references to every authority from Homer to Einstein. The displays of erudition conceal the contradictions in his thought. For Cummings, science and markets have mechanisms that governments lack, “to build reliable knowledge”. You cannot respect his intellectual integrity when he and the wider right have nothing to say to the overwhelming majority of British scientists who think Brexit is a national disaster and take no notice of the panicking markets.

Cummings took TS Eliot’s poem The Hollow Men as the title for his musings on the failures of Westminster and Whitehall. “We are the hollow men. We are the stuffed men. Leaning together. Headpiece filled with straw.”

Ivan Rogers, the UK’s former ambassador to the EU, in 2016. Photograph: François Lenoir/Reuters

Our hollow governing class “ruthlessly weeds out people who are dissenters”, Cummings said as he implied that the radical right would allow freedom of speech. It’s a joke and a sick joke at that. The right has forced out ambassador to the EU Sir Ivan Rogers and chief Brexit negotiator Olly Robbins for speaking truth to power. Johnson has built a cabinet of sycophants and helped push our ambassador to Washington to resign for offering his frank opinions. If you want to see hollow men leaning on each other gaze at Johnson, Farage, Gove and Raab egging each other on as they drive their country towards a calamity.

Eliot closes with: “This is the way the world ends. Not with a bang but with a whimper.” How apposite. The failure of the right to be honest with itself, and live by its own rules, will leave the British whimpering for as far ahead as anyone can see.

• This article was amended on 4 August 2019. It originally stated that Olly Robbins had been an ambassador to the EU. This has now been corrected