Boris Johnson’s lies encapsulate Britain’s democratic decay. They are the bluster of a man who holds parliament and political accountability in contempt. They reveal the corruption of a Brexit movement that has no purpose now other than to secure an empty victory, whatever its original intentions and whatever damage it does to the traditions of Britain’s democracy, once thought to be indestructible and now revealed to be as ephemeral as dust in the wind.

Do I need to justify the above? It’s what they want you to do. They come out with a big brassy lie and then insist that you so lose yourself in the thickets of a detailed rebuttal no one can follow your argument. But for the record and because I must, when the Observer revealed last Sunday that Johnson was planning to shut down parliament to stop it thwarting a no-deal Brexit, Downing Street spin doctors led by Robert Oxley, Johnson’s press secretary, said the report was “entirely false”.

When it was shown to be true, Johnson did not apologise for the behaviour of his underlings. Instead, he tried to divert attention with a blabbering pretence he was not closing parliament to stop MPs preventing a crash out, but so he could prepare a Queen’s speech on police and education funding. No government needs to close parliament to prepare a programme. The civil service and party researchers can work on it, regardless of whether parliament is sitting or not. MPs, however, cannot ask questions about constituents whose businesses and jobs are in danger. Select committees cannot test whether Johnson’s preparations for Brexit are as thorough as he claims. And parliament as a whole may not have the time to stop a no-deal Brexit, which it has every right to do because at no point in the 2016 referendum did Vote Leave say that a crash out was what a vote for Brexit might entail. Indeed, Johnson, Dominic Cummings and all the other quacks who fill our government said the precise opposite.

I am glad to see the polls show 70% of the public don’t believe a word Johnson or his press officers say

“The prime minister believes politicians do not get to choose which votes they respect,” said Cummings, who, lest we forget, has himself been found in contempt of parliament for refusing to answer its questions (our new masters really don’t like questions). He forgot to add that governments don’t get to choose whether our elected representatives vote at all. Or at least they didn’t until Cummings took over the country.

I am glad to see the polls show 70% of the public don’t believe a word Johnson or his press officers say. (Although I wonder about the bovine credulity of the minority who accept their stories even after the defence secretary was caught on camera saying the suspension was all about Brexit.)

I could go on. But I am in the undergrowth slashing around in the detail, which is where they want me to be. Hack through it and you see a bleak road ahead.

Brexit has become a war to the death where “winning” is all. Its supporters are not even fighting for a cause any more – just for the thrill the unrestrained assertion of power can bring. Cummings revels in his ability to call on the police to help him sack an aide to the chancellor. He undermines his own government and thus the Brexit campaign. But these considerations are as nothing to the pleasure a nerdish little man can feel in playing the tough guy.

In the 1990s, the original Eurosceptics clothed themselves in the union flag and said they were defending the sovereignty of parliament. Now they are subverting it. The obvious point to make, but no less valid for that, is there is no reason why a Corbyn government should not follow suit. Its leaders were brought up in a Leninist milieu, which despises “bourgeois democracy” with a ferocity that matches that of Cummings. Yet fear of setting a precedent for the left has not restrained the Johnson administration. It treats Britain’s constitution (such as it is), its standing and prosperity, and frightened European citizens in Britain and British citizens in Europe, with equal insouciance. A determination to get Brexit over the line drives it. Nowhere are the inadequacies of its macho politicians more evident than in their delusion that there is “a line” and once over it we can move on. Brexit isn’t just for Halloween. It is for life. It is a never-ending diversion from our real problems because we cannot cut ourselves off from our nearest neighbours and largest trading partner. If we try, we will one day have to go back and accept what whatever the EU gives us.

A perpetual crisis has its advantages, however. It is the atmosphere in which today’s populists thrive. Apparently disparate modern movements are united by their determination to win by destroying independent checks and their contempt for truth. Johnson and Cummings stand out because they do not need to offer conspiracy theories to prime their base, as Trump, Orbán and Maduro so often do. Fanatical supporters of Brexit want parliament sidelined, as the cheers of the rightwing press show. Rather, they want to show their power by playing with the courtesies of public life they are so energetically destroying. When the prime minister issues a denial, they know an atavistic instinct leads respectable journalists and citizens to assume he is telling the truth, as they cling to comforting assumptions about British exceptionalism.

That complacency, which marks British and particularly English life, still thinks us immune from the malign forces sweeping the globe. If Cummings’s contempt for parliament or Johnson’s suspension of parliament cannot shake it, will a refusal to obey a law stopping Britain endorsing a no-deal Brexit? How about the mass ennoblement of pro-Brexit peers or the creation of new bank holidays to prevent a Commons recall? At some point soon, even the smuggest believers in “it can’t happen here” should realise that nothing is now so “unBritish” as the British government.

• Nick Cohen is an Observer columnist