One week ago, against the advice of its political establishment, Britain narrowly voted to leave the European Union. Within a few days, that establishment was in the process of a full-scale implosion: the country is effectively without government or opposition, shorn of leadership, bereft of direction. As the pound crashed and markets tanked, the chancellor of the exchequer went missing for three days while Boris Johnson, the most prominent member of the Leave campaign, spent the weekend not sketching out a plan for the nation’s future, but playing cricket and writing his column for the Telegraph. Having asserted its right to sovereignty, the country can now find nobody to actually run it.

On the morning of June 24, Donald Trump

Our politics failed us. And since it is our politics only we can fix it. We are leaving the EU and entering a period of volatility without precedent or comparison. Offered a choice between fear of the unknown or fear of the foreigner, fear inevitably won. Britain lost.

In the end those who placed their faith in the “experts” were always going to be disappointed. The pollsters were wrong; the currency traders were wrong; the pundits were confounded. People who did not feel they had been heard have not just spoken. Given a one-off chance to tell the world what they think of how they are governed they have screamed a piercing cry of alienation and desperation.

During the 1964 election Harold Wilson spent a day campaigning in London marginals, addressing crowds from the back of a lorry. Invariably he would be harangued by bigots demanding the repatriation of nonwhite people. Wilson faced the hecklers down. “Whom should we send home? The nurses in our hospitals? The people who drive our buses. Where would our health service be without the black workers who keep it going?” According to the late Paul Foot: “These questions were greeted with great roars of approval from the crowd, and the hecklers were silenced.”

As relatives grieve and a nation mourns, America’s political class will pick through the wreckage of the heinous events in Orlando and try to frame the tragedy in a way that suits their agenda. Those who hoped a tragedy of this nature might be extracted from partisan politics will be sorely disappointed.

Watching Nigel Farage and David Cameron debate Brexit is like opening a DC comic to find the Joker taking on Lex Luthor – they’re both so deeply flawed and thoroughly unpleasant characters you don’t care who wins. Tonight, neither was convincing and neither connected. Charmless and churlish, Farage is like one of those contrarian relatives you desperately try to avoid at a family gathering. Mansplaining, patronising and hectoring, he trolled the questioners, seeking not to persuade but pummel.

In the second round of France’s presidential elections in 2002, the left was faced with an unfamiliar challenge: What accessories to wear to the polls? The Socialist candidate, Lionel Jospin, had been knocked out in the first round. Now the choice was between the fascist National Front candidate, Jean-Marie Le Pen, and the conservative sleaze magnet, Jacques Chirac. There were no good options: Chirac had once

“In life, there’s the beginning and the end,” John Carlos, the black American Olympic medalist who raised his fist in a black power salute from the podium of the 1968 Olympic games, told me. “The beginning don’t matter. The end don’t matter. All that matters is what you do in between – whether you’re prepared to do what it takes to make change. There has to be physical and material sacrifice. When all the dust settles and we’re getting ready to play down for the ninth inning, the greatest reward is to know that you did your job when you were here on the planet.”