Forget about the humiliating Suez invasion of 1956 or fallout from the 2003 Iraq war. Forget about the IMF crisis of 1976, sterling’s Black Friday in 1992 and Margaret Thatcher’s fight with Irish terrorism, let alone with the miners. I was born at the end of the second world war and this is now the greatest British political crisis of my lifetime.

Why? Because it is self-inflicted, hydra-headed and increasingly beyond our control, both politically and economically, at a time when Britain is losing friends fast by peeing on their chips. It may calm down – it will calm down – but this is a rolling crisis which will not end for years. No one can say with any confidence how it will end.

We will muddle through because the alternatives are worse. But it will take more than the blithe optimism of the Brexiters about which we have been reading this weekend as the scenery crashes behind them. Whoops, there goes another 1,000 jobs at HSBC.

The prime minister we hired to take decisions on our behalf has passed the buck back to us for tactical party reasons and resigned when he didn’t like our answer, David Cameron outdoing even Ed Miliband’s resignation for irresponsibility. At least the Titanic had a captain.

In this rapidly evolving drama, Sunday morning newspaper headlines about “Tories in crisis” have already been overtaken by a surge of “Labour in crisis” stories following Jeremy Corbyn’s decision – a decision, at last – to sack Hilary Benn for disloyalty and trigger a mass resignation from the shadow cabinet.

Not that many people outside Labour’s more incestuous tribes look to a Corbyn-led opposition to solve much. Steeped in introspection, ambiguity and a total lack of plausible strategic sense, the Corbynistas aren’t going anywhere. Their feeble-minded impotence during the referendum campaign clinched what many people knew from the start. Call us back when you’re sorted, comrades.

So Labour is irrelevant, absent without leave, as soldiers used to say before we put the now fast-decaying post-war order together, painfully but successfully, after the guns went silent in 1945. Trump, Putin, China’s Xi, they are all assertive nationalists putting the liberal world order and its unprecedented – yes – prosperity (even for the poor) at risk.

The Lib Dems are already pushed aside. Ukip is led by the widely mistrusted Nigel Farage, a lazy crowd-pleaser who cannot work with his own colleagues, has always run away from any whiff of responsibility and disowns any statement that turns out to be unpopular, including his own. That’s why they don’t call him an unpopulist.

Boris deserves to be made ​to sweep up the glass after the Brexit party, but it’s not his style

Scotland? Nicola Sturgeon is the best player left on the pitch, but she wants to leave the club, another part of the Great Unravelling.

That leaves the Tories, their leadership always pretty mediocre now – come back, John Major, eh, much is forgiven – to sort out the mess of their own devising. More precisely it leaves the triumphant Brexiters more or less masters of the field. George Osborne, always overrated, never popular on the backbenches, will soon be gone. But who takes his place?

Off the cuff, Phillip Hammond, currently foreign secretary but relatively well-qualified to run the Treasury – David Laws had to be given the No 2 spot in 2010, earmarked for Hammond – is my tip for chancellor. He is mildly sceptic and pointed out some obvious problems – Gibraltar anyone? – with Brexit, but kept his head down. He would be a unifying figure.

But what do I know? What does anyone know any more? First the Tory rank and file, then ageing social conservatives and old free market zealots, young ones as well (bullies, too, from what we read), kids who can’t tell an EU treaty from a computer game. “You mean that the red stuff is real blood?”

It looks like Boris, doesn’t it? Self-regarding, clever, shifty Boris must be counted among those many voters who have said since Friday: “I only voted leave because I assumed remain would win.” He deserves to be made to sweep up the glass after the Brexit party, but it’s not his style. If it wasn’t so serious it would be fun to watch Boris squirm.

He hates being disliked, so must be in a cold sweat after feeling the anger of the crowd. “Crikey! I didn’t mean it. Can we press the ‘restart’ button? This time I want to play on the other side.”

Michael Gove? He’s the kind of self-styled intellectual journalist in politics who caused so much trouble in 20th century politics, not a bad man, decent enough in his way, but not as smart as he thinks he is, vain with it. He’s not a leader either and – to his credit – knows it. Behind him lies the zealous, over-confident Dominic Cummings, his special adviser at education – forced out – humiliated at the Treasury select committee when his version of reality collided with its clever Tory chairman, Andrew Tyrie.

Buyers’ remorse is said to be gripping some casual Brexit voters, just as it gripped some Corbyn backers last year

Like nature, politics abhors a vacuum, and the risk always exists that bad men, bad women too, may move quickly into that space. No villain or any retail political talent is currently visible on the British stage, thanks goodness. But as George Bernard Shaw once wrote: “Do not believe the laws of God were suspended for England because you were born here.”

Brexiters have constantly stated that this is exactly what they do believe, in the same way that diehard England football fans always think that this time the World Cup or the Euros will be different – until they’re not.

And, there are foreign villains to consider too: the French National Front leader, Marine Le Pen, and the Republican property developer, Donald Trump, being only the most conspicuous. By abandoning the solidarity of alliance we have made ourselves – and our allies – more vulnerable.

Sensible people cannot say with any confidence what will happen next. Will markets settle down or raise the price of British debt, thereby making poorer Brexit voters even poorer, but probably not much affecting Boris’s £5,000-a-week Telegraph column or the UK tax bill paid by the paper’s owners.

Will Corbyn survive for a while longer? Yes, I suspect; he’s pretty solid in his righteous self-belief. Will Theresa May manage to stop Boris? Probably not. Will remain find a legal way to reverse Thursday’s vote by slamming empty stable doors? Ditto. But in a situation like this, you never know.

Buyers’ remorse is said to be gripping some casual Brexit voters, just as it has already gripped some of last year’s more voter-sensitive Corbyn backers, plus the ones who have noticed Thursday’s mass defection to Ukip’s darker version of Brexit.

On that dodgy £350m rebate on the battlebus and a rapid end to excess immigration, the Brexit crowd is fast retreating. Voters who believed their mendacious campaign just might get cross when they find out. David Cameron, meanwhile, has let it be known he’s very proud of his reform on gay marriage. We’ll see what the Brexit ascendancy makes of that too.