THERE IS a palpable sense of crisis attending every action and very utterance of the government.

The startling resignation of Munira Mirza, Johnson’s longest-serving consigliere, a veteran of his days as mayor of London and head of the Downing Street policy unit is just the most significant. Other escapees include the head of communications and chief of staff as well as less elevated functionaries.

Much of the week has been taken up by desperate measures to shore up Johnson’s operation with the appointment of new functionaries and of Jacob Rees Mogg as the bizarrely titled “Brexit opportunities minister.”

The proximate cause of these ructions is the Prime Minister’s incapacity to find a consistent explanation that might justify the never-ending frat-house frolics by which Number Ten relieved the rigours of lockdown. Johnson’s continuing failure to provide an account of his personal role in these revels has so eroded his standing that even Nadine Dorries might find him a less desirable object of adoration.

The roots of the crisis lie far deeper than his manifest unsuitability as a prime minister.

Johnson’s accession to the leadership of the Tory Party was the consequence of a change in its internal dynamics. Brexit was not the unanimous preference of the capitalist classes. Indeed the main movers and shakers, the biggest banks and corporations, the leading core of the civil service and the defence and intelligence establishment, along with the main liberal elements in the media, were firmly opposed.

But the shock that the still-present threat of a left-led Labour government sent through the ruling elites could only be lessened if a section of Labour’s historic bloc could be detached. The wedge issue that allowed this was the Brexit referendum, which exposed fissures in British society which the conventional politics of parliamentary majority versus her majesty’s loyal opposition could not.

Johnson owes his leadership of the Tory Party — and thus the Number Ten prize for leveraging Brexit into an election winner — to his cliff-edge decision to be a Brexiteer and further to Keir Starmer’s sabotage of Labour’s maladroit compromise over the implementation of the referendum result.

To this can perhaps be added the long-term effect of Gordon Brown’s veto over Tony Blair’s plan to take Britain into the eurozone. This put a limit on the power of the EU (and thus German capital) to regulate fully Britain’s economic policies.

The utility of the eurozone is that, once a member, the costs of exiting are ruinous — but outside of it the measure of autonomy that possession of one’s own currency allows seeds the sense that a fuller recovery of sovereignty is possible.

Where a section of capital saw opportunities — Rees Mogg prominent among them — in breaking away from the EU, a greater mass of people saw in Brexit the mechanism whereby they could have a decisive say and stake a claim to sovereignty.

It is worth recalling that nearly one in four Labour voters and six out of 10 Tory voters together helped to make up a 52 per cent Brexit vote. Buried in these figures was the fact that 64 per cent of the three most exploited and oppressed categories of British people voted to leave the EU. Only in the upper stratum of most prosperous voters did Remain prevail.

An extra boost to the Brexit majority was delivered by people who normally do not vote in elections but saw in this binary division an opportunity to exercise a measure of power that the existing political system fails to provide.

But of those between ages 18 and 24 who voted (over which a dispute continues about turnout) nearly three quarters voted Remain. The more education people had the more likely they were to vote Remain.

The toxic treatment which the Brexit debate imposed on all social classes and demographic groups has fed a political climate in which basic class issues appear as culture war questions.

It is in overcoming these divisions that the left needs to find an enduring basis of unity if Labour’s historic electoral alliance of workers and progressive elements in the middle strata is to be reconstructed. This necessarily entails fighting today’s battles and not yesterday’s.

Because Brexit is a settled issue, with the divisions in the ruling class for the moment more or less patched up and the main contours of the EU’s compromise agreement with Britain settled, much of the heat has gone out of the argument.

And those ardent and innocent Remainers who saw in Starmer the human embodiment of their desires now understand that for him they were the “useful idiots” of legend and he is a fully signed-up member of the corporate dispensation.

It is a hard lesson to learn but not everything in politics is what it says it is.

This takes us on a very brief diversion by way of the Revolutionary Communist Party (RCP) that Mirza was a member of, whose alumni now staff the Spiked media operation, decorate the opinion columns of the reactionary press — and even wear ermine in the service of the crown.

Their upwardly mobile path ­from their origin as a student faction of the Socialist Workers Party — distinguished as disputatious even in that uncollegiate milieu — to their present role as flag wavers and a think tank for the libertarian right took a few years.

By 1990, the failure of the British working class to recognise in the RCP the revolutionary vanguard it needed to accomplish its historical mission left the cadres — now established on the first rungs of their graduate careers — to conclude that the actually existing working class had “no political existence” and that, in the circumstances then prevailing, “class politics cannot be reinvented.”

This cleared the way for their accommodation with a ruling class whose existence cannot be disputed and whose prosecution of the class struggle is never in doubt.

The RCP itself dissolved in 1997 — its media operation Living Marxism folded in 2000 and relaunched the same year as Spiked. Hardly now a secret society and with cover names mostly abandoned, Spiked operates as much as a mutual benefit society for ageing members of the chattering classes as a consistent political operation. Where the adherents of Opus Dei might flagellate themselves in private, Spiked spear carriers take to every possible media outlet to flog the living daylights out of conventional liberal opinion.

Mirza’s initial role in Johnson’s entourage was as an adviser on arts and culture and thus she became London’s deputy mayor for education and culture. Her distinctive task was to provide an intellectual veneer to the idea that the discrimination and oppression experienced by people of colour in Britain should not be seen as the effect of institutional racism.

Spiked commentary on her exit from Number Ten has it that “Johnson was swept to power on an extraordinary wave of populist energy. But neither he nor his team have ever managed to turn this into a coherent programme for change. Nor have they ever truly made use of the freedoms given to them by their large parliamentary majority.”

Their argument is that Johnson has been largely passive or even receptive when it comes to the very Establishment thinking he was put in power to challenge and that he is wasting the opportunity Brexit provided.

It is here that the trajectory their ideas describe intersects briefly with reality — only to veer off into a planet far, far away.

In a week in which the operations of the market mean British people face a £500 hyper-inflationary hike in energy prices, Brexit could mean that the energy providers and utility companies that channel unimaginable profits to private owners might be returned to public ownership, prices regulated and profits used to reinvest in sustainable energy and industrial regeneration programmes that provide jobs.

Under a left-led Labour government this would have been a natural first step in subordinating the market to the collective interest.

This is the same week in which the chair of the Bank of England told British workers to hold off on wage claims to fight inflation. In giving voice to this well-worn Establishment demand, Andrew Bailey (salary circa £600,000) was expressing an anxiety, born of Brexit, that the institutional support membership of the EU provided to wage restraint policies — even beyond the extra constraints imposed on eurozone members — no longer applies.

Recollect that Corbyn told the TUC conference that a Labour government would “put power in the hands of workers” rather than the “born-to-rule Establishment” with a ministry for employment rights and a workers’ protection agency to enforce rights, standards and protections and that Labour would give powers to inspect workplaces and bring prosecutions and civil proceedings on behalf of workers.

Raising wages and benefits is at the centre of class politics today. Already a strike movement is underway. Workers across the country are learning from one victory over another that collective action can bring results. The idea is beginning to gain ground that change is within the grasp of working people even if a radical reforming government is not immediately conceivable.

This weekend cities and towns throughout the country will see the first mass assemblies of a new coalition of resistance led by the People’s Assembly and driven by a determination to impose the popular politics of the street over the privileges of the elite.

It is in this movement of working people that a new way out of the barren politics of the present moment will be found.

Nick Wright blogs at 21centurymanifesto.