Even in the matter of her self-destruction, Theresa May remains stuck in someone else’s shadow. She is not the first but second prime minister whose career has been destroyed by Brexit. The referendum result, remember, forced David Cameron to quit within hours. Unlike 2016, this time the possible replacements are already champing at the bit. The Saj, The Truss, BoJo and Michael Gove: they’ve been on manoeuvres for months. When a normally adult Tory like Jeremy Hunt starts chest-thumping about how he’s not frightened of no deal, you know he wants to be party leader. Today’s papers contain plenty of boilerplate about how a leadership race will begin in summer, which raises the obvious question: how will anyone tell the difference?

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Hanging over all of this is the sense that who gets to be prime minister of Britain is a private matter for the top of the Tory party; that a national crisis should somehow be a careers fair for 22 people. You can put some of that down to Cameron’s law for fixed-term parliaments, but there is also the thick, sweaty air of entitlement.

You can see the gamble May has made. By ending her career, she hopes her withdrawal agreement will win over the hard-right headbangers who have held this country to ransom since 2016. And then those boys who never had the brains or the elbow to do any of the hard graft of negotiation – the Borises and the Raabs – but just wanted a woman to do their dirty work while they moaned at her, will take over while promising the addled membership that they will renege on the promises that they have just signed into law.

This is the gamble and to my mind it is still the most plausible scenario (although that’s not saying much since everything looks simultaneously possible and unfeasible). Certainly last night you could see the principled objections of the likes of Jacob Rees-Mogg crumble at the first sight of real power. The big question is whether Arlene Foster, Nigel Dodds and the DUP – who are playing a different game, with goals beyond Westminster – will go along with it.

From the mess of this morning, two observations can be made and one question advanced. First, the cynical strategy of promising the impossible to the rightwing press and party and then coming home with a compromise just doesn’t work. The past three years and the ashes of May’s career should serve as sufficient proof of that. Since all would-be successors have set that as their strategy, they are effectively condemning themselves to failure from the get-go. Theresa May is not the first prime minister to be destroyed by Brexit. She won’t be the last. Second, the country that voted for Brexit was already sick to the back teeth of self-serving elites, invisible pay rises, a public realm falling to bits. None of these problems have moved an inch closer to resolution in the past three years. Nor will they while the governing elite remains obsessed with Brexit and their own advancement. Put those two observations together and Britain looks like a country that will spend years under the shadow of Brexit, burning through prime ministers like a Silicon Valley startup spends dollars.

Which brings me to my question: if you’re a Labour MP, why would you vote alongside these people? Why be the accessory to the ongoing crimes of the Tory yahoos? Better by far to back a second referendum.

• Aditya Chakrabortty is a Guardian columnist