The world’s most densely betwatted space at the best of times, Westminster became even more wantonly apocalyptic in the days and hours leading up to the historic defeat of Theresa May’s Brexit deal. Behold, a bell-tolling, haute remainer, yellow-vested, journalist-infested, shitbird-MP-crawling, flashmobbed performance art piece entitled: HAVE YOU THOUGHT ABOUT THEOCRACY INSTEAD?

How should this Brexit crisis be fixed? Our writers’ verdicts | Matthew d’Ancona and others Read more

If not, don’t rule it out. An awful lot of things are apparently back on the table after May’s flame-out, including – but not limited to – default no deal, extending article 50, a Norway-style arrangement, second referendum, and return to absolute monarchy, by either the Queen or David Attenborough.

The scale of the task of unbreaking Britain is jointly summed up by the vote result, and by each of the polar-opposite factions outside parliament being convinced they’d won. Everyone celebrated maniacally. As far as the UK’s lo-viz yellow vest movement goes, Westminster pavements are now a great place to get hooked up with the right militia for you in the event of no deal. As for the more provisional wing of the People’s Vote, we no longer need to computer-model the answer to the question: what would happen if you gave everyone on Henman Hill crystal meth?

At the heart of this scene, a physically crumbling parliament building, half propped up by scaffolding. Unfolding inside on Tuesday night, a parliamentary procedural of quite staggering plotholes and continuity errors. Welcome to the Blunderdome.

After Stanley Baldwin, then prime minister, had made the abdication announcement in the House in 1936, the MP Harold Nicolson bumped into him in a corridor outside the chamber. The moment was obviously one of electrifying historic drama, yet Nicolson’s diary entry archly conveys Baldwin’s self-centric take on it.

“I detected in [Baldwin] that intoxication which comes to a man, even a tired man, after a triumphant success … ‘I had a success, my dear Nicolson, at the moment I most needed it …’ No man has dominated the House as Baldwin did tonight,” Nicolson concluded, “and he knows it.”

The same could not be said of Theresa May, who rose to the occasion like a replicant Anglepoise lamp. Basic shambles model. Indeed, speaking of the abdication, it’s grimly amusing to consider that Theresa May’s big intervention in the 2015 general election campaign was to warn that “if we saw a Labour government propped up by the SNP, it could be the biggest constitutional crisis since the abdication”. As it turned out, madam would have something rather bigger up her own sleeve.

So what now? Well, there’s a motion of no confidence to while away today, and 72 days left on the Brexit clock. May’s serial dishonesty throughout this entire process saw jeers greet her post-vote claims of a new “constructive spirit” in which “the government will work harder at taking parliament with us”. The jeers were well founded, given it took barely hours for it to become clear that this wouldn’t extend to even speaking to Jeremy Corbyn. Which might well suit Labour’s leader, the High Triangulator, who is reportedly going to keep calling no confidence motions until one produces the answer he likes. An irony that will doubtless be appreciated by those of his supporters angling in vain for a second referendum.

As for May, her clinical standoffishness is entirely of a piece with the way she has behaved for the best part of the two and a half years since the vote, and certainly since the 2017 election. One of the most remarkable, and indeed excruciating, things about May has been her insistence on governing like she’s got a landslide majority. Why has no one told her? She’s the Florence Foster Jenkins of politics, insulated from the realities of her situation by weird or venal enablers. Never has the intervention of a candid best mate been more needed. At some point in July 2017, surely Amber Rudd or whoever should have gone round and given May “The Talk”. Along the lines of: “Babe, true friends tell you the truth, amirite? Because if no one else is going to say this, then I will: the referendum vote was problematically close anyway, and then you totally spaffed your majority. Like, you literally have no majority. So … you need to stop acting like Mariah Carey, OK? On the plus side, you look great in that trouser suit and I’ve brought round two bottles of cava. Let’s get pissed and watch Working Girl again.” Alas, at no point since the election does this essential public service appear to have been performed.

Play Video 0:37 Parliament Square cheers as Theresa May suffers Brexit deal defeat – video

Somehow even less appealing than May’s performance, though, was the spectacle of politicians rushing to the telly cameras in its wake. Here comes Chris Grayling, the least appealing ferryman since Charon, who’s going to rule out a customs union right off the bat.

Here comes voluminously overcoated Jacob Rees-Mogg, who still resembles an 11-year-old Jacob Rees-Mogg sitting on Nanny’s shoulders for a nursery game called Disaster Capitalist’s Bluff.

Here come a lot of Tories claiming this all-systems clusterfuck is an “opportunity” to “go back to the EU”. And say what? “Look, if you’ll just give me three cosmetic concessions, then I feel sure I can get those elusive last 230 Infinity Stones.”

And here comes the affectedly shambling figure of Boris Johnson – not so much a statesman as an Oxfam donation bag torn open by a fox – who could conceivably still end up prime minister of no-deal Britain. May needed to go again to the EU “with a high heart, fortified by the massive rejection of the House of Commons”, judged Johnson, speaking as always like a Taiwanese news animation of Winston Churchill. In the meantime, “we should be actively preparing for no deal with ever more enthusiasm”.

As for Dominic Raab … dear dear. Show me someone who is trying harder than Dominic to make himself happen. OK, you’ve shown me The Saj and Gavin Williamson, and even cub health secretary Matt Hancock. One of the things you really have to admire about the Tory males is the time they make for self-care. Even at moments of really cataclysmically pressing national business, they insist on carving out the sort of me-time that is, say, a thinly disguised leadership speech at the Centre for Policy Studies. Yes, let the historical records show that on the eve of the vote, Dominic Raab was trying to look like tomorrow’s man in an address that, among other things, floated the idea of “Asbos for business”. Not now, mate, yeah? We’re a bit busy.

Yet Dominic did a second lectern event in the hours before the vote, this time teaming up with David Davis and Arlene Foster, who still has all the warmth of the matriarch of a remote farm who retains the passports of her labourers.

As for Davis, we’ll play out with an interview the former Brexit secretary gave a German magazine last weekend, in which he handpicked two mindboggling examples of situations in which Britain was Definitely Not Wrong. “Oh, I’m certain that Brexit will be a success,” Davis breezed. “Remember, every single major issue in our history is one where you might be right or wrong. Appeasement before the second world war, we might be right or wrong. Suez, we might be right or wrong.” Well. I for one can’t wait to see what’s going to happen next.

• Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist