The mess we are currently in began three and a quarter years ago but reached a cacophonous crescendo this week.

Although the question on the EU referendum ballot paper in 2016 was a simple ‘Should the United Kingdom remain a member of the European Union or leave the European Union?’, it has become clearer than ever that the political class wanted us to vote one way.

If we had chosen ‘Remain’, as most of the Establishment expected, Britain would still be stuck in an unhappy marriage with Brussels. However, the country voted the ‘wrong’ way. We voted to get out of that unhappy arrangement.

As it happens, the British people’s decision wasn’t that extraordinary.

In the past, whenever other member countries were given a vote on the EU, they too had said ‘Stop!’ The Dutch shouted it at the ballot box some years earlier when they were asked to ratify a proposed constitution that drove Europe towards being more of a super-state. The Irish snubbed Brussels in a similar referendum in 2008.

But these countries were ignored and were told to vote again until they swore subservience to Brussels as it steamrollered along regardless. Yet some of us thought Britain was different.

In the Saturday Essay, DOUGLAS MURRAY warns that the UK may never leave the EU. (Pictured: A cacophonous moment in the House of Commons this week when Conservative MP Philip Lee defects to the Liberal Democrats)

Like the Netherlands and Ireland, the political author warns that the democratic wishes of the people of the UK look set to be snubbed by its political class. (Pictured: The Conservatives are considering standing a candidate against speaker John Bercow in the upcoming general election)

When Prime Minister David Cameron and most others across the political establishment said the 2016 vote would be a final, once-in-a-lifetime decision on Britain’s membership of the EU, we believed them. When they said that if we voted to leave, that wish would be respected, we believed them. When they also warned that we would have to leave the EU without a deal if no good deal with Brussels was forthcoming, we believed them. And we voted accordingly.

After the Brexit vote, an Italian-born friend of mine who voted Leave, said: ‘They’ll never let us leave.’

I thought she was wrong. I naively believed that the legacy of Gladstone, Disraeli, Lloyd-George, Churchill and Thatcher was an ineradicable one of democracy based on Parliamentary sovereignty. That this was a country whose MPs recognised that they must represent the people, not use Parliament against the people.

Well, it seems that view was wrong.

Because as this disgraceful last week has shown, Britain has an entire political class that has spent three years trying to do just one thing: trick us, force us, or bore us into having that 2016 vote cancelled.

Of course there were ominous signs from the start. Cameron never bothered to plan for Britain to leave the EU. Nobody in Whitehall seriously prepared for a ‘Leave’ result. And, of course, infighting among figureheads of the Leave campaign immediately after the referendum handed the keys to No 10 to Theresa May.

It grieves me to say it, but she proceeded to embrace the opportunities of Brexit with all the enthusiasm of a horse trotting through the doors of a knacker’s yard.

But even the years of the May government did not show the political class in all its horror. It took this past week for that to be revealed.

When Prime Minister David Cameron and most others across the political establishment said the 2016 vote would be a final, once-in-a-lifetime decision on Britain’s membership of the EU, we believed them, writes Douglas Murray. (Pictured: Boris Johnson at the dispatch box this week)

First, consider the position that the Labour opposition now expounds.

This is a once-proud party. The party of Clement Attlee and other patriots.

All his other vices aside, Labour is now led by a man who has spent the past three years facing three different ways: claiming to respect the EU referendum result; in favour of ignoring the vote and backing those who want to reverse the result.

Yet not until this week had Jeremy Corbyn and his party tried to publicly defend holding all these views, and more, in such a transparently ridiculous and disingenuous manner.

As the appallingly supercilious and patronising Emily Thornberry confirmed on BBC1’s Question Time on Thursday night, her party’s policy is that if it became government, it would do the following.

It would renegotiate the current Brexit deal with Brussels. At the end of that renegotiation, it would hold a second referendum. And during that referendum, it would argue against its own deal.

Could any stupidity better exemplify this wretched political class?

Until this week, watching people such as shadow Foreign Secretary Thornberry and her party’s lamentable shadow Justice Secretary, Richard Burgon, try to explain their views was almost funny if it wasn’t so serious a subject.

For months, they have daily been calling for a General Election, but we suspected they didn’t really want one because they feared they would lose. But then, this week, their tactic turned from silly to sinister.

Thankfully, with Thornberry’s execrable performance, the public now knows the truth about Labour’s confused and unscrupulous policy.

And the rot is endemic across Westminster. A fortnight ago, MPs squealed that the Prime Minister’s decision to prorogue Parliament — and cut short the autumn break by three days — was a ‘coup’.

How absurd considering that this Parliament has achieved nothing substantial in relation to Brexit in three years and three months. Would sitting for three more days really make any difference?

In another blow to the government his brother Jo Johnson also quit his post, and said he could not support a hard Brexit. (Pictured: Jo Johnson in a car at Westminster on September 4)

The truth is that it is long overdue for this Parliament to be put out of its misery — particularly as we have seen this week that it didn’t have the sense or decency to kill itself and put us out of our misery, too. The rot of this Parliament has seeped deep into the foundations of our political system. Every part is now compromised.

We have a Commons Speaker who berates members of the Government on tiny issues of protocol. But he himself has torn up centuries- old conventions.

While the Speaker’s role should be that of a ring-master, John Bercow has taken it upon himself to be a ring-leader. Shamefully, he has spent recent weeks plotting with the opposition against the Government.

Then there are the members of the Conservative party who have chosen to pretend that the 2016 vote is still up for negotiation. It is amazing watching Sir Nicholas Soames, Ken Clarke and others behave the way that they have.

These are serious heavyweights of the political scene — noble and lifelong members of the Conservative tribe. But the Conservative party called the referendum. The Conservative party has said — under three consecutive Conservative Prime Ministers — that it would enact the result of the referendum.

Soames, Clarke and their fellow 19 rebels cannot pretend that they did not know this was the plan. And if they disapproved, they should have absented themselves from this process long ago. It is no exaggeration to say that if the Conservative party does not see the Brexit vote through, then it will be toast. Off to the graveyard of political history, with the National Liberals, at best.

And yet when the Prime Minister needed their votes this week in what was in essence a confidence vote in a precariously positioned Conservative government, these Tory rebels chose to side with its enemies.

Their treachery suggests they would rather have a Jeremy Corbyn government than have the No Deal Brexit that was always a final possibility.

What’s more, by attempting to tie their own government’s hands, they have tried to ensure their boss, the Prime Minister, can’t carry out his policy and is locked into ‘a deal at any price’ despite being opposed to it. What the 21 rebels have done is not just profoundly anti-democratic, it’s dangerous.

I thought this Parliament could not sink any lower. But it continues to do so.

Emily Thornberry has also revealed Labour's own Brexit plan. She said that, once they are in power, they would renegotiate Britain's exit deal before holding a second referendum where they campaigned against their own deal. (Pictured: Thornberry on Question Time this week)

One of Nick Clegg’s few ‘achievements’ as Deputy Prime Minister was to introduce the Fixed-Term Parliaments Act. This stipulated a Parliament should last five years unless there is a two-thirds majority in the Commons to dissolve it.

This week, the Labour party and Tory rebels tried to trap Boris Johnson in that vice. By refusing to give him the majority of MPs needed to call a General Election, they have despicably betrayed the public.

For his part, Johnson, over recent weeks, has shown himself to be perhaps the only leader left in public life in Britain willing to do what the public asked for.

He recognises the central truth — which is that there is no form of Brexit so bad that it would be worse than having no Brexit at all. He is fully aware that not leaving the EU would be the most profound hammer-blow at the heart of our democracy.

I fear we would not overcome the effects for generations.

For failure to deliver Brexit in some form would show that we do not really have a democracy.

Instead, it would send a message to the world that we have a bureaucratic class which decides when it does, and does not, listen to the public’s verdict at the ballot box.

That may have been tolerable in Holland and even Ireland — where votes against Brussels were reversed — but never until this era did it seem imaginable in Britain.

By saying he wishes Britain to leave the EU on October 31 with or without a deal, Johnson has shown that he understands the implications of such a potential betrayal.

So JUST how has Parliament reacted?

By seizing control of the Brexit process and attempting to hijack the man trying to see through the verdict of the referendum, MPs have attempted to force Johnson to be as disloyal to the public as they themselves have been.

It was an appalling low-blow for the Prime Minister’s MP brother to stab him in the front.

The Labour party has been crowing about this act of fratricide along with other opponents of Brexit and the Prime Minister.

The brutal fact is that we are now looking into an abyss.

It is not the abyss of a No Deal Brexit. Britain is strong enough, rich enough and resourceful enough to get through any temporary trading hitches that would result from that. I believe that a terrific future could still lie before us.

But the abyss is a political one of Parliament’s making. Whether we fall in or pull back will determine whether we protect the soul of this country.

Of course, history tells us that a number of democracies have faced such abysses before. But Britain never has.

However, this is the terrible prospect considering that we are now faced with a Parliament that is wilfully set against its people.

We can cope with many things in this country. We have dealt with lacklustre governments before. Goodness knows, we have endured third-rate Parliamentarians.

But never before have we had to see our votes stolen by a Parliament packed with men and women who first ignore the people and then refuse to make themselves accountable to the people.