Nothing is certain about the turn that events may take if Britain votes to leave the European Union, except that it would be interesting. That is no recommendation. To invert the apocryphal Chinese curse, given Europe’s bloody history, we should hope for boring times.

If David Cameron wins the referendum, he must be ruthless with his Tory foes | Matthew d’Ancona Read more

A remain vote would create drama of a parochial kind. The culture war that began as a domestic tiff in the Conservative party and evolved into a messy street brawl would go back indoors. Screams of betrayal and the sound of broken Tory crockery would waft from Westminster. The rest of the country could go about its business.

A leave result would mean convulsion on a bigger scale. There is no precedent for a country quitting the EU. The crisis would be continental. The Brexit camp has no idea what should happen. There is a plan to walk out and slam the door, but nowhere to go next. Turmoil is part of the appeal for leaders of the leave campaign, although they dare not advertise thrill-seeking among their motives. It makes them sound reckless.

They are reckless. For Boris Johnson, there is a career advantage in hastening the collapse of David Cameron’s premiership. Relations with Britain’s closest trading partners can be collateral damage in that campaign. There is nothing in Johnson’s record to suggest interest in the welfare of anyone who cannot advance his ambition.

Michael Gove’s case is more intriguing. The justice secretary is drawn to disorder as a purgative tonic – a moral enema for constipated bureaucracies. David Laws, the former Liberal Democrat schools minister, in his chronicle of coalition, recounts a private apology Cameron once made for Gove’s impulses: “The thing that you’ve got to remember with Michael is that he is basically a bit of a Maoist. He believes that the world makes progress through a process of creative destruction.”

In the Govian worldview, the European project is not an economic alliance but a morbid symptom. It is a pathogen that constricts sovereignty and enterprise. No side-effect of treatment can be too severe if the reward at the end is a zero Brussels count in the national bloodstream. Job losses, market panic, recession, political crisis – all possible, yes. But there’s no shock therapy without a shock. If it’s hurting, it’s working.

When Cameron uses “creative destruction” to describe Gove’s philosophy he is alluding to Joseph Schumpeter, the Austrian-born American economist who developed Karl Marx’s account of the way capitalist systems evolve. Crudely speaking, Schumpeter described a cycle of new goods and forms of production challenging and deposing old ones. A reigning generation adapts or dies by market obsolescence.

A feature of all grand, deterministic theories is the impatience they inspire in acolytes. Free market ideologues, like revolutionary Marxists, do not sit around waiting for existing orders to die of natural causes. Having decided that a system is destined to collapse under a weight of internal contradictions, the obvious course is to jump up and down on vulnerable pressure points. Sometimes the forces of history need a helping hand. In that spirit, Gove used to keep a portrait of Lenin in his office.

This selfish, strangely adolescent revelling in the power to provoke mayhem has consequences beyond our shores

The anti-capitalist left has always mistrusted the European project, and still eyes it with a saboteur’s glint. Jeremy Corbyn may have been persuaded to back the remain cause by his MPs, but pragmatic compromise is not his natural idiom, and it shows. He endorses the EU with the lugubrious evangelism of a dentist recommending root canal treatment.

That is unsurprising given that his ascent was steeped in the romance of radicalism. Corbyn was carried on the shoulders of young idealists who are not in a movement for tinkering with the status quo. But he sees that the version of Brexit on the menu has been cooked up by people hostile to every social protection he has sworn to defend.

That is another feature of the leave proposition on which Johnson, Gove and friends choose not to dwell. Their creative destructive process starts with a bonfire of regulations, which are presumed to stifle enterprise but mostly shield workers from capricious dismissal and discrimination. Freedom to be sacked for daring to have a baby doesn’t chime so well with the poster invitation to “take control”.

Such sleight of hand is integral to the Euro-vandal fantasy. There is a hidden clause in every promise of radical upheaval, left or right, that indemnifies the authors of chaos against payment for its consequences. The language is suffused with violence but the rabble-rousers never anticipate being at the scene.

Systems need smashing, bastions need storming – which sounds thrilling if you aren’t the one trampled in the stampede. Gove and Johnson indulge creative fantasies of Brexit because they have the capital and connections to weather a spell of destruction. When a revolutionary plans an omelette, it’s always someone else’s eggs that have to be broken.

This selfish, strangely adolescent revelling in the power to provoke mayhem has consequences beyond our shores. A leave vote emboldens every national-chauvinist opposition in Europe while debilitating the moderate centre. But that too is part of the formula. Nigel Farage has spoken eagerly of the prospect that Britain’s departure might trigger a domino effect, leading to the union’s unravelling. There is a millenarian ardour about the hardliners who see Britain as the saviour nation, liberating itself and the rest of the continent from federalising folly.

Whether many citizens of other EU states welcome Brexit as an act of benevolent arson is beside the point. Another feature of revolutionary fervour is that it recognises only the opinion of the loyal, enlightened vanguard. Criticism is proof of the critic’s capture by the corrupt old order.

It is possible that enough people in Britain are frustrated with the way things are to vote for a drastic change of direction without knowing the destination. That is what the leaders of the leave campaign are relying on. They fizz with the thrill of destruction, yet they hold no blueprint for creation.

Gove, Johnson, Farage and the rest are lighting a fire on the off-chance that a phoenix will rise from the ashes, while safe in the knowledge that it won’t be their livelihoods going up in smoke.