A dramatic photo-essay played out on the front pages of the newspapers last week. On Tuesday: a snap of Theresa May solemnly signing a letter. On Wednesday: one of Sir Tim Barrow solemnly handing it over to the disapproving president of the European council, Donald “Tsk” Tusk. I didn’t buy a paper on Thursday as I didn’t have the stomach for the inevitable picture of Tusk solemnly wiping his arse with it. I’d already got the gist.

Please excuse the remoaning. I know it’s frowned upon. It wasn’t for this that all those elderly Leave supporters dragged themselves out to vote! This isn’t what they fought a war for! Though not many of them actually did that. Those guys are mainly dead. The Few are now the Fewer, soon to be the None. So I should say: this isn’t what they, in many cases, lived through a bit of the war for (but often as infants so they can’t really remember it)!

If they can’t remember it, perhaps that explains why they’re so sanguine about renouncing an institution that’s done more than any other in history to preserve peace between the major nations of Europe. I wonder if their parents would have been so hasty. The demobbed Tommies who voted for Attlee over Churchill might not have been as easily convinced as their children have been that youngsters with foreign accents working in coffee shops is such a diabolical threat to Britain’s values and existence. They’d probably seen worse.

Surely the winning side should be chipper, at least for the moment. This is the honeymoon period

Anyway, this kind of remoaning isn’t what members of the luckiest generation ever born betrayed the sacrifices of their parents for! I’m sure that’s a form of words we can all agree on. What it feels like they actually did it for, and the clamour against remoaning has contributed hugely to this feeling, is for the Remainers to shut up. That seems to have been an outcome that was confidently expected among Leavers, and nobody even painted it on a bus.

“Come on, you lost – you have to shut up now! For years you’ve been going on and on and on about multiculturalism and fair trade and equal marriage, and how foreigners are lovely and we’re nasty, and chickens get treated terribly, and recycling and rape and pitta bread and how nothing is quite as it seems, and now you’ve got to stop or it’s not fair. Everyone voted to say they were sick of it and that’s that!”

That would explain why, as the consequences of last year’s referendum grind remorselessly on, there’s so much anger and bitterness on both sides. Surely the winning side should be chipper, at least for the moment. This is the honeymoon period — if a divorce can have a honeymoon period. Which I imagine it can: this is the leave your socks on the floor, get drunk and piss in the sink bit. The bleak contemplation of a vast acreage of solitude stretching ahead towards a cold grave is still to come.

Illustration by David Foldvari.

So come on, Ukip, put on your favourite pants and order another takeaway – safe in the knowledge that there’s a growing chance the bloke who brings it won’t be able to live here soon. “Sergei, Sergei, you know me: it’s nothing personal! There is just, quite simply, not enough room, yeah? Capeesh? Now what do I owe you, my friend?”

But the Ukippers, even in their hour of victory, don’t appear to be very happy. They seem baffled and in disarray, even by their own bickering standards. I suppose they’ve been going through a bumpy patch: it took them a long time to find a leader who could pull off the elusive double of both being able to stomach the job for more than 18 days, and not being Nigel Farage; they’ve just lost their only MP (not in an election – there was some sort of falling out as usual); and nobody seems very optimistic about their prospects in the local elections in May.

It’s not just that though. I think the party’s Brexit spokesman, Gerard Batten, really got to the heart of the malaise when he said last week: “We don’t want article 50 to be triggered.” Wow. My daughter is 23 months old so never in my life have I been more aware of what Farage would probably describe as “a woman’s prerogative”. Still, was ever such an energetically campaigned-for rice cake so rebuffed? “You what now?!” is the only response.

Contextualised, Batten’s statement is marginally less mad. He reckons the whole article 50 process is “a trap” and we should just leave. Don’t get sucked into all that metropolitan liberal elite article-triggering claptrap, he reckons, we just go. Brick up the Channel tunnel, throw a lasso around Rockall and then pull ourselves off into the sea — like the good old days, eh Gerard? The whole complex negotiation of Britain’s departure is something he says we could “do in an afternoon”. And he’s Ukip’s Brexit spokesman, so it’s definitely his area of expertise.

The party’s new leader, Paul Nuttall, was slightly less down on article 50 but promised that Ukip would be the “guard dogs of Brexit”. He also set out “six key tests” for Brexit that he’ll definitely be able to say aren’t met.

So it’s all happening like they wanted it to – like they’d barely have dreamed of 15 years ago – but they’re still cross, still picking holes, still cueing up the future rhetoric of betrayal. Meanwhile, Nuttall is promising a huge shakeup of the party, its structure and its policies: “The name will stay, that’s the one thing I’ll guarantee,” he says.

On one level, this is a response to a practical problem: Ukip was established as a one-issue party and that issue has been resolved in its favour. It’s lost its ostensible reason to exist, but it still exists. New issues to bang on about must be found.

But, my instinct is that their crisis runs deeper than this: the leading Ukippers have spent decades convinced that the anger and dissatisfaction they felt, with which their lives were infused, was caused by one thing. And now the thing has gone. What if they feel the same? A crushing realisation for them, but also for the rest of us. Their misdirected zeal could easily have tipped the balance in the referendum.

So, excuse the compl(rem)aining, but we really must stop people self-medicating their undiagnosed psychological problems by causing huge, ill-conceived geopolitical shifts. First the Iraq war and now this. I blame social services.