LONDON — As Brexit and its attendant chaos hurtle toward us, one of the most darkly humorous features of contemporary British politics (a competitive field) is the ubiquity of parliamentarians, pundits and business titans who wail and gnash at our ceaseless political tumult but appear utterly incurious about the conditions that produced it.

Ten years on from the start of the financial crisis, they cannot entirely ignore the many ways in which politics has been reconfigured by the 2008 crash and its aftershocks. Such stalwart defenders of a certain brand of “common sense” capitalism have watched in horror as ill-mannered upstarts — on both the right and the left — build power at the fringes. But these freshly emboldened centrists pretend that the rupture has no connection to their own dogma and seem to envision the whole sorry mess as some sort of administrative error that will be swiftly tidied away once the right person, with the right branding, is restored to authority.

“There is a hole in the center made for a savior,” an op-ed essay in The Times of London declared earlier this year. That article, like many similar ones that have appeared before and since, mentioned the former Prime Minister Tony Blair, his fellow New Labour luminary David Miliband and Nick Clegg, the Liberal Democrat deputy prime minister under David Cameron’s first government, as possible candidates to lead a liberal revivalist movement along the lines of Emmanuel Macron’s En Marche party in France. There’s never any shortage of speculation on who might fill the hole. The trouble is that neither the would-be figureheads nor their media cheerleaders seems to be interested in why it appeared.