I once knew a kid who had set his heart on a career in journalism. He didn’t have much of an in with the London media, so he decided to go the old-fashioned route: an entry-level reporting job on a local paper in a small market town. Not much pay. Bullying editors. Lots of stories about bins. But a job, nonetheless – at least until a solitary member of the public complained that he had embellished a quote. He was sacked for bringing shame on to the paper, a few months into his career. Such was the family shame, he never attempted to get a job on another paper. He is now a teacher.

I often think about that when contemplating the career of Boris Johnson. Perhaps if my friend had failed on a grander stage – say, if he had been sacked by the Times for fabricating quotes – he might now be 7-2 favourite to be the next Conservative leader.

For most of us, to experience professional shame on the Johnson scale would have prompted emergency family meetings, sleepless nights and squirming flashbacks. Shame: the “soul-eating emotion”, as Carl Jung had it. But for Johnson, this catastrophe was a mere piece of toilet paper attached to his shoe, easily laughed off. Indeed, an absence of shame has proved his distinguishing feature as a politician. It is what has allowed him to lie and be found out again and again; to fail all tests of his responsibility repeatedly; to be despised and excoriated by millions and millions of voters, but still to have pretensions of running the country. It’s almost superhuman.

So the 48 letters are in, and there will be a no-confidence vote against the prime minister tonight. Theresa May might yet survive this humiliation, her own particular talent. Or she might not, in which case the Conservative party will shamelessly indulge in a leadership contest – a vote it supposedly settled in 2016 but now wants to run again. Soon, a few hundred Tory MPs and as few as 60,000 party members could be deciding who is your new prime minister. The United Kingdom is now a piece of toilet paper trailing from the Conservative shoe.

But looking down the list of adult failures regarded as frontrunners – Dominic Raab, Jeremy Hunt, Michael Gove, Esther McVey etc – I find the political machinations (grim though they are) somehow less awful than the psychological implications. While you might expect politicians to possess a degree of resilience, at a certain point, you might expect some shadow of shame to take over. Raab: how is he not crippled by his own ludicrousness? Liam Fox: wasn’t his career already once finished by scandal? Jacob Rees-Mogg: as he fine-tunes his offshore schemes, does the merest flicker of self-doubt never howl across his bones? When Cabinet meets, do they all stare abjectly into their notes, occasionally looking up to exchange haunted looks? Why not? Have they not considered that the values Conservatives apparently hold dear – personal responsibility, stability, community and common sense – might be better served by collectively dissolving into an inky black pool on the carpet?

For the mess Britain is in – the antipathy that now scars the country – is the creation of the Conservative party, its particular strain of reckless entitlement. Caroline Lucas was correct to say that Brexit is a project of the right, by the right, for the right. It’s not to say that leave voters weren’t animated by legitimate grievances; or that there aren’t many progressive reasons to leave the EU; or that Labour couldn’t get its own act together. But the fact is, the EU wasn’t our problem until the Tories made it our problem. An astute analysis of Ipso Mori polls by the FT’s Alphaville shows that until David Cameron called the referendum, fewer than 6% of the electorate had the EU as their political priority; immigration was more important. Now, more than 50% of the electorate cite Brexit as the issue that most animates them; meanwhile concerns about immigration have diminished. That suggests that Brexit is a proxy for something else; immigration, yes; but immigration is itself a proxy of fear. That only implicates Cameron’s strategic mistake further. Still shameless after all these years, he popped out of his shepherd’s hut to wish the prime minister well this morning.

But such is my own ordinary mortal shame threshold, I begin to wonder if it isn’t in fact our fault as individual British citizens. I wonder if reality TV and social media witch-hunts haven’t given us a dark taste for the spectacle of shame; if we secretly relish seeing our leaders soil their pants on an international stage; if we have reached the point where only the shameless can possibly survive? Or perhaps this is simply a result of the privatisation of shame; a signature Tory move. We as individual citizens burn with the humiliation that our elected officials neglect to feel.

• Richard Godwin is a freelance journalist