ON SEPTEMBER 19th Toys “R” Us, one of the biggest players in America’s toy market, filed for bankruptcy. At about the same time Tories “R” Us, one of the biggest players in Britain’s political market, was doing everything possible to prove that it is heading in the same direction. Voters dislike nothing more than a party at war with itself. The Tories went to war over the most important problem facing the country—one that is largely of their own making.

Boris Johnson, the foreign secretary, ignited the conflict with a lengthy article on Brexit in the Daily Telegraph, a week before Theresa May was due to give a big speech on the same subject in Florence. Amber Rudd, the home secretary, accused him of “back-seat driving”. Sir David Norgrove, Britain’s chief statistician, criticised his “clear misuse of official statistics” in reviving the claim that Brexit would give Britain a windfall of £350m ($475m) a week to spend on the National Health Service. In Mr Johnson’s defence Jacob Rees-Mogg, a backbench Tory, suggested that he should be given a knighthood. As The Economist went to press Mr Johnson was preparing to demonstrate his loyalty to Mrs May by sitting in the front row for her speech, having proclaimed, poetically, that the cabinet was a “nest of singing birds”, as if voters cannot discriminate between trilling nightingales and hissing vipers.

What does this soap opera tell us, other than that Britain is ruled by an incestuous clique of frenemies who delight in turning even the most serious issues into melodramas? The most obvious thing is that Britain’s prime minister is as weak as it is possible to be while still residing in Downing Street. Mr Johnson challenged her authority on the most fraught issue in British politics at a peculiarly sensitive time but still kept his job. Sir Vince Cable, the Liberal Democrats’ sharp-tongued leader, compared Mrs May to a headmistress “barricaded in her own office” for fear of unruly pupils. This does not bode well for negotiations which, if they are to succeed, will require Mrs May to persuade her party to sign off on all sorts of concessions and trade-offs.

Still, in exposing Mrs May’s weakness, Mr Johnson has revealed his own. Not so long ago he was the Conservatives’ leader-in-waiting. His success in getting himself elected mayor of London—a left-leaning and multicultural city—proved that he possessed “the Heineken factor”, refreshing parts that other Tories could not reach. Part Bertie Wooster and part Jack the Lad, he went down well at both Tory fetes and in city boozers. Today he is reviled by liberals and distrusted by many party loyalists. As mayor, he was frequently hailed as a hero when cycling through the city. Now he is subject to abuse. A recent poll of Tory activists about who should be the next leader gave him less than 8% of the vote, well behind his fellow Wooster imitator, Mr Rees-Mogg. The result is an impasse. The leader of the government is too weak to impose her authority; the leader of the hard-Brexit faction of her party is too weak to depose her; and Jeremy Corbyn, the hard-left leader of the Labour Party, gets ever stronger.

Even more worryingly, the Johnson affair reveals how poorly Britain’s preparations for Brexit are going. Mr Johnson’s critics such as Kenneth Clarke, a liberal Tory grandee, argue that the foreign secretary should have obeyed the rules of collective cabinet responsibility: ministers ought to air their views within the cabinet and then defend the collective line. But it turns out that Mrs May has never engaged in a big cabinet debate to determine the line. Instead she has limited discussion to various subcommittees, from which Mr Johnson was pointedly excluded. He was driven to write his article because he thought that the government was slouching towards a “soft Brexit” on the basis of subterfuge rather than open argument.

The foreign secretary has highlighted the fissure at the heart of Tory and British politics. Brexit involves a trade-off between what technocrats call “control” (meaning sovereignty) and “access” (meaning freedom to trade with the EU). Soft Brexiteers such as Philip Hammond, the chancellor, and Ms Rudd favour access over control and a long transition rather than a cliff-edge Brexit. They want Britain to “shadow” the single market by obeying most of its rules, including those against striking independent trade deals, for as long as possible. They have the support of most business leaders, who fear disruption more than anything else.

Hard Brexiteers such as Mr Johnson think this would make a mockery of Britain’s decision to leave the EU in the first place. They want a relatively short transition—Mr Johnson has suggested six to 12 months. They point to the fact that Canada has a comprehensive trade deal with the EU without being a member of the single market and insist that “no deal would be better than a bad deal” on the ground that the worst that can happen is that Britain will revert to World Trade Organisation rules. The central argument in Mr Johnson’s magnum opus was that Brexit is an opportunity to be seized, but that most of those in charge of implementing it see it as a bomb to be defused.

The great betrayal

Mr Johnson’s talk of optimism betrayed also suggests the beginning of something darker: the stab-in-the-back theory of Brexit. Brexiteers are already hard at work explaining why their glorious idea has failed to bear fruit. Brexit was implemented by its enemies rather than its friends. Mrs May was too naive to take on EU officials whose only concern was to see Britain humiliated. Mr Johnson’s intervention this week has positioned him to revive his leadership ambitions as the tribune of this stabbed-in-the-back faction. The Tories’ agonies over Brexit not only make it more likely that the next prime minister will be a hard-leftist who blames Britain’s problems on the machinations of international capital. They also make it more likely that the prime minister after that will be a rightist who blames the country’s problems on the machinations of closet Remoaners and Eurocrats.