The end of the year hurtles down the slipway, trailing catastrophe instead of a magnum of champagne in its wake, and the excuse to prod and poke at the seething innards of 2018, or at least to flog a few more copies of your product, is irresistible. It’s awards time!

But is there, anywhere, deep in the entrails of the last 11 months, a tiny yet sparkling reminder that politicians – as well as posturing in TV studios and messaging Tom Newton Dunn on WhatsApp to say that this time, they really will probably very soon almost come to the brink of resigning – are also engaged in shaping the future of the UK?

Something in me yearns for the days when Gordon Brown got taken apart for pretending to love Arctic Monkeys

Sadly not, if you were to judge by the Spectator’s parliamentarian of the year awards on Wednesday. Waking to discover the gurning images of David Davis and Dominic Raab sharing the award for cabinet resignation of the year all over my Twitter feed is not so much “project fear”, a phrase Davis had been intoning only hours earlier, as he brought his alpha brain to bear on the Treasury and Bank of England’s suggestions that crashing out of the EU may just damage the economy, as “project waking nightmare”. The Steptoe and Son of the Leave campaign, hawking myths off the back of an Iveco flatbed truck, now have a place on the mantlepiece of history. Like the captain of the Costa Concordia, they abandoned ship moments before it hits the rocks of unbending reality, and now they have an award for it. Captain Francesco Schettino is into the third year of a 16-year prison term for manslaughter. They have a narrative about the Brexit betrayal.

Every trade needs heroes, and by their heroes they shall be judged. Beneath the lowering cloud of Brexit it’s not hard to discern some real political courage, beginning with the latest, Lloyd Russell-Moyle , the MP for Brighton Kemptown who spoke with such eloquent humanity about the day he was told he was HIV positive. The Chatham & Aylesford MP Tracey Crouch is the easy winner of political resignation of the year (and, to be fair, she did win the Spectator’s award for ministerial resignation) after she exposed the government’s hypocritical stinginess over capping fixed-odd betting terminals.

The tricky thing about politics, as cabinet ministers keep revealing they’ve just discovered, is that it is not just about winning elections and campaigns and followers on Twitter. It involves hard work, and understanding, and knowing actual facts, like something about the history of the Troubles if, say, you find yourself asked to be Northern Ireland secretary so you don’t gravely confess to not realising that nationalists won’t actually vote for the DUP. Or – should you be so fortunate to get the call to the Department for Exiting the EU – that Dover is a pretty key place when it comes to Britain’s trade. Could you actually get even GCSE politics without knowing that faith and political allegiance are still largely inseparable in Northern Ireland, or that all those trucks on the M20 are not, in fact, there to obstruct your journey to your French farmhouse, but carrying important stuff across the Channel? Something in me yearns for the days when Gordon Brown got taken apart for pretending to love Arctic Monkeys when he quite possibly hadn’t heard of them.

Westminster has always been tribal, and the history of ministers being appointed for something other than the brilliance of their intellect is long and distinguished. Whitehall employs plenty of big brains to cover any gaps in their political bosses’ brain power. There is a good reminder of this (if you needed it) from Inside the Foreign Office, the BBC’s latest attempt to interest people in the machinery of government, which has the possibly unintended consequence of making the FCO look like the political version of 999, where British idiots have to be rescued from the remote abroad at enormous public expense.

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But the Borisification of British politics, bleakly exposed in the BBC series where the director of Europe finds herself compelled to talk to the former foreign secretary about a speech he is shortly to give, just makes Westminster look more distant from actual life than, say, Elon Musk. In the clip doing the rounds on social media, Johnson sets out like a toddler in a supermarket to goad this senior official into smacking him on camera. (More gags, he demands, unwittingly giving his obituary writers the perfect headline.) It’s almost enough to evoke a smidge of gratitude to Michael Gove for eviscerating Johnson moments before he began what might have been a triumphal march to No 10.

Saying that this is all just one more sign of the brokenness of our politics is true, but not helpful. Johnson’s carelessness with the substance of politics, the hard back-office work of getting to your objective without trashing the machinery on the way, has already had its effect. Awarding a prize to people who have cut and run from the consequences of a catastrophe they were instrumental in making just confirms it.

• Anne Perkins is a former deputy political editor of the Guardian