PANTOMIME season started early this Christmas with the Tories indulging in a bout of blood-letting in a staged performance of Leadership Wars. The performance for one night only was great box office, but left many of the audience disappointed.

This is the Conservative Party’s favourite game, in which members are able to indulge their instincts to cling on to power by whatever means necessary. For now they calculated it was necessary to retain Theresa May, judging that their own terrible internal candidates or the threat of Corbynism was worse even than this ongoing nightmare.

So after last week’s leadership contest Theresa May’s embattled premiership limps on, improbable as that may seem.

Dogged endurance is her only discernible quality and she seems to think it useful as a political strategy. She is like Muhammad Ali in his 1974 Rumble In The Jungle match against George Foreman, but without the coup de grace. There is no comeback in May’s “rope-a-dope”. Although battered she carries on endlessly flying round Europe looking for answers to her intractable self-created crisis, staring at the airport baggage conveyor belts and secretly wishing to snatch someone else’s luggage and zoom off to start a new life on an island far away.

She appears like a sort of void-person, clutching at straws and trying to retain her own rictus grin, surrounded by a combination of high-profile fantasists and low-profile incompetents.

Our very own Secretary of State for Scotland is clearly in the latter camp, but there is a new edge in the air among the fantasists high on the fumes of their own rhetoric.

This new Tory mindset is shorn of the pretence of paternalism and embittered in its glorious new nationalism. It’s a potent mix of decline and menace which brings the normalisation of food bank culture and leads seamlessly to Priti Patel suggesting we threaten Ireland with food shortages to break a better Brexit deal.

This week Iain Duncan Smith, not to be undone by Patel, was now threatening the EU: “If you want a deal you’d better damn well step up to the plate” he said to complete incomprehension on Thursday.

The confusion and machismo is all over the place. One anonymous former minister, talking about the negotiating tactics of the Taoiseach Leo Varadkar, blurted: “We simply cannot allow the Irish to treat us like this. This simply cannot stand. The Irish really should know their place.”

This unreconstructed colonial mindset may play well in Tory circles or on the editorial pages of their own newspapers but it has a diminishing value in what is widely known as the “real world”.

The bravado and bluster of Rees-Mogg, Boris Johnson and their followers may seem glorious to deluded Brexit England, but beyond this small, fetid circle it’s seen for what it is: boring, presumptious old men deluded in their increasingly desperate nationalist fantasies.

There is an optimistic danger that the Conservative bile spills out and contaminates their own party, with Philip Hammond suggesting Wednesday’s confidence vote in the Prime Minister was a way to “flush out the extremists” opposing her Brexit proposal. This prompted Iain Duncan Smith to claim the Chancellor’s comment was an indication of the “beginning of the end” of the Conservative party.

This seems unlikely.

But the level of anger and lashing-out does seem to be increasing as the reality dawns that there are no solutions to the preposterous crisis they have imposed on the rest of the country.

Blue on blue anger seems to be on the rise, with reports this week of Cabinet colleagues in tears at the prospect of their leader’s departure.

IT reflects the oddly internalised world of Brexit England, where it is reported that 120,000 children will be homeless this Christmas. The new data shows the number of children living in temporary accommodation is at its highest for 12 years.

That’s a 73% increase since the Tories took power. But the crocodile tears rolled down the cheeks for a prime minister who is married to a senior executive at Capital Group, a company with huge stakes in the likes of investment bank JP Morgan, defence giant Lockheed Martin and tobacco company Philip Morris, and reputed to be controlling $1.4 trillion in assets.

So dry your eyes mate.

May’s mismanagement of the Brexit process is legendary but wholly self-inflicted. She, like her predecessor David Cameron, will be entirely alright whenever the crescendo of venal incompetence hits and she is finally forced out of office.

This was a week where there seemed to be a collective awakening to the reality of the situation and the deeper political roots to it all. Writing in Politico Ryan Heath suggested: “Let go of any illusions that this drama is about trade protocols, residency rights or the status of the Irish border. The histrionics going on in the United Kingdom aren’t even really about its impending departure from the European Union — or about Prime Minister Theresa May’s tenuous attempts to cling to power. Brexit is the story of a proud former imperial power undergoing a mid-life crisis.”

But others have located Brexit as specifically an English phenomenon.

As Mark Hutchinson writes in the Irish Times: “There is a deep sense of irony in that it is England’s own decision to now leave the European Union, and recover a supposedly independent global presence, that has finally exposed how little may now be left of Britishness in the 21st century.

‘‘The term British was first used by James I and VI, when, as King of Scotland, he ascended the thrones of England and Ireland in 1603. But such an identity did not find the sort of dominant cultural presence we might expect in either Scotland or England. They remained separate kingdoms until the Act of Union of 1707.”

He continues: “… the Ulster Plantation was the first real British policy because it involved both the Scots and the English working together. In fact, Ulster established the framework which has continued to define British identity in that Britishness had meaning, not within the geographical confines of the actual island of Britain, but in Ulster which sat outside its boundaries.

“Being ‘British’ co-opted Scotland into England’s long-running involvement with Ireland, which was now justified under the labels of British ‘civility’ and Protestantism, as opposed to something particularly English.”

Patrick Cockburn at The Independent makes the same connections: “It is worth recalling the degree to which British politics was divided and poisoned by fierce disputes over Irish independence for the whole of the 19th century and early 20th century, right up to the moment that Ireland achieved self-determination in 1921.

‘‘What used to be called ‘the Irish Question’ has now been reborn as an all-consuming issue by ‘the Scottish Question’ and, whatever the timing and outcome of a second Scottish referendum, it is not going to go away. Supposing that Theresa May really believes, as her patronising rejection of another poll in Scotland might suggest, that ‘the Scottish Question’ can be indefinitely delayed, then she will be joining a long dismal list of British leaders down the centuries who made the same mistake about Ireland.”

Cockburn concludes: ‘‘Concepts like ‘nationalism’ and ‘self-determination’ have traditionally been seen as something that happens to foreigners. An English failing today is an inability to recognise the egocentricity implicit in such nationalism and the extent to which it alienates and invites confrontation with other nations in the British Isles and beyond.”

This form of self-blindness is a cultural trait that England will need to transcend if it is to survive its own ordeal.

But this will be difficult when its own political culture is so deeply mired in myth-making and such intense self-deception.

Threaten “Europe”, tell Ireland to “know its place”, treat Scotland with barely concealed contempt, but Britain will dissolve in the process and England will emerge an isolated country that has undergone a public exercise in self-immolation.