Of all human reflexes, jingoism is the most dangerous. It was evident in the hysteria of Tuesday’s Commons vote on Theresa May’s deal. Neither MPs nor the crowds outside had any alternative to offer, so they just shouted: “How does Brussels dare?” We have been in this mess before: I can just remember Suez. My father, who opposed the intervention and hated Anthony Eden, still became emotional when listening to Land of Hope and Glory at the Proms that summer of 1956. As if bitten by some wartime patriotic bug, he shouted: “How can Nasser dare?” At school we were being fed Nazi war stories almost daily. We were thrilled to be fighting dastardly foreigners again.

The Brexit saga: what happens next? Read more

Suez was a classic of futile imperialism, a belief that there was still a world stage on which Britain was entitled always to get its way. America had briskly to teach Britain a lesson in 20th-century reality. Eden had lied over colluding with Israel and suffered ministerial resignations. But it was ill-health and feuding colleagues that finally drove him from office. Parliament and public opinion backed him all the way.

Parliament is never happier than when defaulting to belligerence in foreign affairs. MPs supported Tony Blair over the Iraq war in 2003. In 2011, they again approved David Cameron’s Libyan intervention, before damning it in an inquiry five years later. Politics is a theatre of inconsistency, as well as of dislike of foreigners.

To invert Clausewitz, we now have war by other means – that of Europolitics. There has long been a xenophobic echo to Brexit. It was audible again this week, with May cast as Neville Chamberlain, appeasing uppity Europeans. MPs had voted overwhelmingly to honour Brexit and invoke article 50 in 2016. Now that implementing it was proving complicated, all they could do was howl in frustration.

The closest parallel to today’s travails is Robert Peel’s attempt to repeal the corn laws in 1846. He was faced with an Irish famine and a desperate need to cut the price of bread. He spoke for the new mercantile Tories, demanding cheap food and free trade. Since the party’s landed interests strongly disagreed, Peel could only win by securing the support of the Whig opposition.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Sir Robert Peel, second baronet, 1788 to 1850. Photograph: UniversalImagesGroup/Getty Images

The country prospered, but the Tory party did not forgive Peel the treachery of siding with the opposition. The ambitious Benjamin Disraeli called it the “wilful destruction of a great party by its leader”. The Tories were out of power for 20 years. The irony was that in 1867, when Disraeli himself was prime minister, he was forced to concede a wider franchise, as proposed by the Liberals. Lord Salisbury in turn accused him of committing “a betrayal that has no parallel in our parliamentary annals”, and went on to succeed Disraeli as party leader.

Nothing in politics beats wrecking parties as the quickest, if riskiest, route up the greasy pole. In 1922 the rising Tory star Stanley Baldwin split his party over leader Andrew Bonar Law’s support for the Lloyd George coalition. This let Labour into office in 1924, but Baldwin became leader. Accused of opportunism, Baldwin declared: “I would rather be an opportunist and float, than go to the bottom with my principles round my neck.” His most glaring imitator was Labour’s Ramsay MacDonald, prime minister in 1931. He broke with virtually his entire cabinet over austerity, after the crash of 1929, to become short-lived leader of a mostly Tory national government. Labour did not forgive him.

The Commons is not and never has been a place of free-thinking individuals. It is a collective of clubs, tribes, chancers, leaders and followers, swayed like anyone by public emotion. It can be a sounding board, but what it cannot be – as some MPs are struggling to make it – is a substitute for the executive arm of government. Brexit cannot be left to backbench MPs to wander the corridors and come up with an answer behind their leaders’ backs.

May has been confirmed as her party leader and has the formal confidence of the house. She is charged by what appears a parliamentary consensus to head for a “soft” departure from the European Union. Some version of a single market/customs union was suggested by the equivocal nature of the referendum and is indicated by current opinion polls. A compromise must be found.

The Tory party used to pride itself on its pragmatism, but since the Maastricht treaty vote in 1993, it has lost the art of compromising on Europe, even with itself. The May deal offered a way for the Brexiters to have their Brexit, and the friction-averse to avoid their friction. But the party seems more exhilarated by fission than with fusion. The party’s traditional conduits of discipline and loyalty are clogged and corrupted.

Are Tory remainers pondering a conscious uncoupling from the party? Read more

As a result, a compromise deal on Brexit again replicates Peel. It has become impossible without the collaboration of Labour’s Jeremy Corbyn, or at least a sufficient body of his MPs to cancel the Tory rebels. Both parties face splits. Corbyn may survive his, but those underpinning a government are more dangerous. May simply must forge a one-issue coalition, however briefly, on a proposal to be taken back to Brussels. But the evidence of Tory party history is that this may be her last act in politics. If so it would be an honourable one.

We still seem miles from there. What is unique today is that both May and Corbyn are clearly suffering inner demons of inflexibility. The power of charm is a long underrated quality in British politics; that and the gift of courtesy towards those with whom one disagrees. Britain has party leaders who seem bereft of both these qualities.

• Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist. His Short History of Europe will be published in paperback in September

• This article was amended on 18 January 2019. In earlier versions the second photograph, captioned “The Conservative politician Robert Peel”, was actually of his son, the Liberal MP and third baronet Sir Robert Peel.