The outcome of today’s Chequers cabinet summit on Brexit policy was not yet known at the time of writing. Yet the 11th-hour proceedings, and everything that has led up to them since well before the 2016 referendum, underscore a huge and continuing political truth. That truth is not affected by the Chequers outcome – and it is not sufficiently often stated either. Yet it blights every aspect of our political life as a nation.

Most revolutionaries have a plan for what they want to do after the revolution. Cromwell had one. So did Washington and Robespierre, Lenin and Mao. The plans may have been good ones or terrible ones, but at least they were plans. These revolutionaries were desperate to implement their projects.

Britain’s Brexiters are not like that. They want their revolutionary act – leaving the European Union – and they have got it. But they accept absolutely no responsibility for what comes afterwards. Instead they arrogate to themselves the right to carp, criticise, reject, undermine and denounce as betrayal every aspect of every attempt to define the consequences of their revolution. They have no doctrine other than dislike of the EU. They have no programme to replace it. Their revolutionism is a performance not a project. It’s an act – vacuous, hollow, infantile, fanciful and foolish.

The Chequers meeting has been a classic illustration of this fundamentally frivolous and destructive approach to politics. After two largely wasted years, and with the clock ticking towards Brexit in March 2019, Theresa May finally came up with a plan this week to try to give the Brexiters what they want – Brexit – but on terms that many remainers can live with. She and her officials have spent months trying to craft a compromise that would combine Brexit with terms that allows Britain to keep its promises on Ireland and to maintain jobs and the economy.

And the response? As soon as they got the Chequers draft, the Brexiters did the only three things they ever do. First they denounced the draft as a betrayal, then they leaked their version of it to the anti-European press, and finally they closeted themselves away to threaten and plot against Mrs May. Detailed alternatives? Different drafts that might resolve difficulties, bring disputants together or persuade the EU? Dream on.

Never at any stage do the Brexiters ever accept the practical duty of producing a detailed post-Brexit plan. Instead, David Davis smirks through meeting after meeting, Boris Johnson gabbily chases cheap headlines, Michael Gove spins a wordy web of courteous waffle and Liam Fox insists that black is white and white black. Mr Davis said this week that Mrs May’s ideas would not work. So, what might work instead? There was, predictably, no answer from Mr Davis. There never is. The Brexiters created the mess and the burden with which Mrs May has to wrestle. But it is never, ever, their fault. Nothing ever is. It is only, ever, Mrs May’s fault – or someone else’s fault: the civil service, the judges, business leaders, the Irish, the liberal elites or Brussels.

Before the Brexit vote and since, the Brexiters have never put forward a detailed plan of their own. They did not do so this week. They spent 12 hours at Chequers not doing it. They won’t do it next week either. They don’t do plans. They only do fantasy. They spun a fantasy of takeover by Brussels; now they spin a fantasy of liberation from it. They have held our country, its politics, its press and its shared life hostage to their lazy second-rate dreariness for too long. It is time to take the fight to them.