Britain is no readier for Brexit in August than it was in July. But because parliament is not sitting, the sun is out and everything slows down at this time of year, the atmosphere of crisis has dissipated. It is a curious phenomenon: EU membership expires next March, but relentless motion towards a deadline doesn’t bring any sense of advance towards a destination. Westminster cycles between chaos and calm, oddly detached from the reality of what must be achieved without time to spare. This is one thing that strikes me after a month away from the UK. I didn’t go far, only to France, but it was distance enough to notice how, from the outside, British politics manages to look frenetic and stuck at the same time.

Theresa May was also in France at the end of last week. She held talks with Emmanuel Macron at the Fort de Brégançon, a Mediterranean retreat for French presidents since Charles de Gaulle. Or rather, she talked and he listened. The disparity in how much was at stake for the two leaders shone through every account. The British prime minister was depicted as desperate for help from European capitals to rehabilitate a Brexit plan that is only a few weeks old but already ailing. There was no sense of Macron needing anything in return; no discussion of how he should play it.

Many French media reports digressed on to the symbolic question of Brégançon, how it was back in play as a diplomatic stage after a period of neglect. The semiotics of presidential power were more of a talking point than anything the president himself might actually do about Brexit.

Macron hasn’t had an easy summer. French politics has been consumed by l’affaire Benalla – the scandal of a presidential bodyguard caught on film, wearing police insignia to which he was not entitled, beating demonstrators. It has raised questions about unaccountable power and the culture of arrogance around a notoriously self-regarding president. France went into political meltdown and yet, as I watched it happen, I couldn’t help marvelling at how tame, how monochrome it all felt, relative to the psychedelic unravelling of Westminster around the same time.

This is not to belittle Alexandre Benalla’s offences. As scandals go, it’s a big ’un. But immersion in British politics had distorted my sense of scale. Next to Brexit, the story of the preening president’s rogue bodyguard looked almost old-fashioned – a crisis of manageable proportions. You could imagine it one day being discussed in the past tense. And if crisis is the mot juste for what has been happening in France, what the hell should you call the thing that Britain is going through?

There is a common Eurosceptic proposition that the rest of Europe is complacent about Brexit. It is argued that a collapse of the negotiations, leading to disorderly rupture, damages the EU just as surely as it damages the UK – so continental politicians must be forced to confront the risks. Then they will be more flexible, if not from generosity then from awakened self-interest.

No one in Paris, Berlin or Brussels doubts that Brexit is dangerous for the EU and that the failure of talks would be disastrous. But what those who seek to mobilise that prospect for leverage in the negotiations fail to appreciate is how the whole threatening idiom – defiant swigging from the bottle marked “no deal” – completes the picture of a nation losing its balance, sliding out of control. British politics has turned crazy and the craziest politicians wave their craziness around as proof that they should be taken more seriously. The red-eyed, slurring drunk offers to demonstrate his sobriety by pouring out another drink without shpilling a shingle drop.

A booze-fuelled odyssey might contain many volatile scenes, experienced by the drinker as significant episodes: the stranger who becomes the new best friend; the sudden explosive row; expulsion from the pub. But from the outside, these are minor details when the salient story is the drinking itself.

Over the course of one single week in July, the Brexit secretary and the foreign secretary both resigned, there were backbench rebellions and serial government humiliations, there was talk of no-confidence motions, leadership challenges, the prime minister falling, early elections … each day’s events might have qualified as crises in their own right.

Combined, they might have been more than a crisis, yet somehow the sheer volume of mess actually diminished the impact. At least that’s what it looked like from France. It was a violent attack of gut spasms in a body politic tormented by a problem that it refuses to admit. It was Westminster vomiting a load of news on to the kerb before staggering towards the next bar.

The government is so stupefied by Brexit it can hardly walk. Labour says the problem is not the drinking but the choice of drink. As if a slightly softer red from Jeremy Corbyn’s radical left cellar would succeed where the Tory right’s hard stuff has failed. An abstinence movement is growing but it lacks leadership.

Or maybe we just haven’t hit the bottom yet. Maybe British politics just has to ride out a few more cycles of mania and denial. It resembles an addict’s compulsion to keep going, to repeat the degrading pattern again and again, because carrying on feels easier than stopping; because to stop would mean a brutal audit of harm already done, relationships ruined, money squandered, poison already ingested. It is a painful reckoning, but not one that can be postponed for ever.

• Rafael Behr is a Guardian columnist