The situation worsens. It’s a revolution, and like all revolutions, it will eat its own. Nobody yet knows who’s going to end up with an ice-pick through their skull, but history had told us it was likely to be Boris Johnson. People who professed themselves shocked to discover, post-referendum, that Johnson told lies are like people who complain that Barbra Streisand sings. It’s what they do for a living. Johnson had deliberately unleashed forces of xenophobia and mass hatred, however desperately he then attempted to row back, pleading for an unlikely reconciliation with the half of the electorate that had every good reason to loathe him. Nobody knows which plotter may now end up like Marat in the cold crimson bath with a knife through his carotid artery, but the smart money is on Michael Gove. With racism rising on the streets, civil society turns out to be more fragile than we knew.

Two months ago, I gave a lecture in Trinity College, Oxford, predicting the end of the Tory party on the grounds that it was no longer intellectually coherent. Since that evening, nobody has stepped forward to explain to me how Conservatives can claim to believe in the free market while building barbed wire fences and detention camps to forbid the free movement of labour on which the free market depends. My analysis was crowned in mockery by the lackeys of Downing Street. But as with the fall of the wall in Berlin, even I did not expect to see my crystal-gazing fulfilled quite so quickly. Just as in 1989, the speed at which a whole ideology has collapsed has been spectacular. Financial probity was meant to be important. It was, we were told, the party’s entire raison d’etre. But today people who call themselves Conservatives are boasting the hostility of markets and the collapse of the pound as proof of their island virility. Hello! Some contradiction here!

Are there politicians in waiting even competent to negotiate what they have promised?

Ignorant of Scotland by birth and indifferent to peace in Ireland by ignorance, a fatally weak prime minister conceded a referendum because he lacked the character or the skill to make proper argument against his own zealots. During the campaign, David Cameron was incapable of reaching out to anyone not born in his postal district or in his class. The unusual task of uniting more than a single political party behind a cause was impossible to a man who had expressed nothing but contempt for those whose idea of Britain was different from his own. Having rarely bothered to contemplate anything but one cheese slice of his electorate, Cameron found himself face to face with a far wider public. After six years of divisive austerity – one set of policies for the rich, another for the poor – they rightly owed him no favours at all. Immigration may have been the issue, but the collapse of Cameron’s credibility was the cause.

In the Lyttelton theatre on 6 July the National Theatre will celebrate the publication of the Chilcot report with a public reading of my 2004 play Stuff Happens. In recounting the process that led us towards an unsanctioned invasion of Iraq, the story defines the fault line along which the left has divided in the last 13 years to a point where it can no longer offer strategic or coherent opposition. Contrary to fashionable opinion and whatever the report may say, the mere fact of its publication shows some proper respect for the quarter-, perhaps half-million, Iraqi soldiers and civilians who have died as a result of British and American actions. For me it remains a mark of good order that our government should finally face an official reckoning, however flawed. This is one of the defining rituals of a civilised society. People in public are responsible for their actions. Who, contemplating the carnival of dishonesty which was the 2016 referendum, imagines that any similar exercise will be undertaken to unpick the populist lies which have devastated the Conservative party as surely as Iraq devastated Labour?

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Nicholas Farrell as Tony Blair and Alex Jennings as George W Bush in Stuff Happens at the Olivier theatre in 2004. Photograph: Tristram Kenton for the Guardian

Democrats have no duty to endorse democracy’s every outcome. Those bullies who are loudly arguing that only snobs and bad losers refuse to accept the voice of the people should contemplate German federal elections in the 1930s. What we are witnessing is a sort of trahison des berks. Liam Fox, a man disgraced for prioritising intimacy with his best friend over responsibility for the security of the military, is ably matched by Chris Grayling, whose only political achievement is to have deployed executive power to prevent prisoners reading. Nobody knows what will happen when government is handed over to spiteful misfits. As with any revolution, there are countless unforeseen developments ahead. This one has only just started and Jo Cox, whose offence was to dedicate her life to helping Syrian refugees, has died in opposition already. Are there politicians in waiting even competent to negotiate what they have promised? Those who indulged Cameron’s smug inadequacies as a prime minister have been brought up short. In the old days there was a division in politics between right and left. But we are coming to see that the deeper division was between those, such as Margaret Thatcher and Gordon Brown, who knew politics to be serious, a matter of life and death, and those who didn’t. Suddenly we are in the lethal hands of the non-serious.