This video is 20 minutes long, and most of you won’t watch it all the way through. But you really should.

Because the UK is changing, and it’s changing fast.

In the late spring of 2014 we went to a UKIP rally in Bath, and came to a conclusion:

It doesn’t seem too immodest to note that we called it. But the events covered by Sky News today have a very different tone to the one that day. While the 2014 crowd was enthusiastic and delivered several standing ovations to Nigel Farage and his chums, it was mostly pretty quiet and sober. Nobody waved placards. Nobody shouted.

In the European election that followed a few weeks later, UKIP won with 27% of the vote in the UK, although they came a distant 4th in Scotland, just barely scraping a single seat with 10%, seven points behind the Tories in 3rd.

(A result which was of course gleefully reported by the Unionist media and opposition as somehow proving that Scotland was no different politically to the rest of the UK, and the SNP winning the election with almost three times UKIP’s vote was assessed as a “severe blow to Alex Salmond”).

UKIP had edged out Labour and the Tories by just a couple of points (24% and 23% respectively). As we write this we’re still waiting for the results of Thursday’s vote, but the last polls conducted beforehand showed a dramatically different picture.

In most polls, Farage’s new Brexit Party was set to pick up more votes than Labour and the Conservatives combined. The Tories (and the embarrassed rump of UKIP, which has morphed into the extremist fringe racist party its critics always said it was) have been obliterated as a European political force in Britain. The best polls put them 14 points behind the Brexit Party, the worst a breathtaking 26 points behind.

The straw that broke the camel’s back was the six-month extension to Article 50 that the UK government agreed in early April. The threadbare patience of exasperated Tory voters expired overnight and the party’s support – which was nudging 40% as recently as mid-March – dropped as swiftly as a condemned man through a trapdoor.

It now trails Labour consistently in Westminster polling, and the vagaries of the UK electoral system (which would still severely restrict the number of MPs the Brexit Party and Lib Dems could hope to secure) mean that a general election now would almost certainly return Jeremy Corbyn to Downing Street, dependent on the backing of the SNP – a combination that’s the Conservative Party’s worst nightmare.

What that means, of course, is that there’s almost no chance that the new Prime Minister, whoever it turns out to be, will dare to call a general election to try to resolve Brexit before the new 31 October deadline – already a basically impossible task.

And given how furious Leave voters were at the last extension, it chills the blood to imagine how hacked off they’ll be at another one. Because it’s no more likely to produce a result in the current deadlocked Parliament than the last three years have been, and Leavers will get angrier and angrier with every day that passes without Brexit being delivered.

Another long extension could – and very likely would – see a mass desertion of Westminster voters from the Tories on the sort of scale that’s (probably) just happened at the Euro elections, transforming the UK political scene on an unprecedented level and raising a genuine prospect of Nigel Farage becoming Prime Minister in 2022 – something he could never have dreamed of in UKIP.

The EU election was a warning shot, demonstrating just how willing Tory voters are to act. The new PM will only have one way to avoid the absolute and probably permanent destruction of the Conservative Party – to carry out a no-deal Brexit by October. Leavers are in no mood to tolerate any sort of deal any longer.

And while polls consistently show that Remain would win a second referendum and is solidly preferred to no deal, the political situation simply doesn’t offer a plausible route to that outcome, for the reasons noted above.

Thanks to the individual and collective stupidity of Theresa May and Jeremy Corbyn (and Kezia Dugdale), the Tories can’t be forced out until 2022, they can’t afford not to deliver Brexit by then, and no deal is the only certain way to do it.

You don’t need to watch a 20-minute video to grasp that intellectually. But you might need to watch it to really feel it. The UK has already gone over the cliff and there’s no going back – we’re just waiting for the impact and praying for Superman to intervene, which he isn’t going to because he doesn’t exist.

Scotland is fast running out of time to deploy the only parachute.