In The Wicker Man (Robin Hardy, 1973), the key to the sacrifice’s efficacy is that Sergeant Howie (Edward Woodwoodward, 1930), embraces victimhood willingly. And so Liz Truss climbs into her photo-op tank and trundles gladly toward the burning wicker effigy of the role of Chief Negotiator for Exiting the European Union Brexit (formerly Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union), and the poisoned post claims another scalp. Greater love hath no man.

Lord Frost understood. Did he really exit his Exit Secretary job because he no longer agreed with Boris Johnson’s general direction of travel, namely lurching from one leaking honeypot to another like a priapic bear? Or did the lordly Exiteer realise he could not exit the European Union in a fashion that would garnish his square head with coveted laurels? And so, unzipping the tent flap into the howling Arctic gale of public opinion, Lord Frost declared: “I’m just going to the pub with Brexit hardman Steve Baker’s European Research Group. I may be some time. Masks optional, of course.”

The artfully cantilevered Good Friday pivot, which discreetly emolliated the island of Ireland in 1998, fractures and ferments; furious fishermen and farmers fulminate fruitlessly into foam and fertiliser, respectively; our brightest creative talents lower their life expectations accordingly as earnings, market access, postal rates, touring options and cross-border collaborations collapse; despite Michael Gove’s claims to better EU environmental rules post-Brexit, once more we are swimming in human sewage; once more we are known as the “dirty man of Europe” (at least until Allegra Stratton’s revelations about Boris Johnson’s love life surface); and a scheme to lure Nobel laureates to work in buccaneering Brexit Britain attracted precisely no takers worldwide, making us the intellectual destination equivalent of Eddie Murphy’s 2002 box office bomb, The Adventures of Pluto Nash.

Was Boris Johnson’s finally all-too obvious incompetence, dishonesty and lack of any coherent plan, beyond what might get him either elected or noshed off, merely a useful fig leaf to cover the chief Exiteer’s exit from the unwinnable forever war against the phantoms of Europe? The lie-fuelled promises of the Brexit campaign can never be delivered. It is a package, like that gatefold vinyl copy of Hawkwind’s Space Ritual I ordered from a previously reliable French dealer via discogs.com, that appears undeliverable in the post-Brexit world. Brexit did, however, deliver the most right-leaning government in living memory. Was that the idea all along? Slaps head. Falls over. Cries.

Faithful leave-voting red wall constituents, pining for levelling up and Brexit dividends, will be delighted that Lord Frost’s Exiteer replacement, Liz Truss, voted remain in 2016, and was the co-author of the 2012 Tory manifesto-in-waiting, Britannia Unchained. Britannia Unchained opined that “the British are among the worst idlers in the world… Whereas Indian children aspire to be doctors or businessmen, the British are more interested in football and pop music.” What is a “Beatle”, eh Liz? And why have all the footballers got long hair now, like girls? For your information, Truss, both British football and British pop music have been massive engines for your vaunted social mobility, and key elements of the soft diplomacy that briefly made Britain less universally hated all around the world.

A Kurdish nomad on the Syrian border in 1988 bonded with me over his tape of Sheffield’s Def Leppard. With all due respect, the goat-herding tent-dweller had nothing to say about the quality of British businessmen. And there’s a generation of British schoolchildren that take their moral inspiration from Marcus Rashford, not from vegetable magnate Andrew Bridgen, the Igor homunculus of Brexit hardman Steve Baker, who so delighted in his master’s performative online defenestration of snowflake Nadine Dorries this week. (“Go on Steve! Bloody Nadine with her confusing shiny hair!! Get her!!! Oh!!!!! I’ve made a mess in my pants, Steve!!!!!”) Believe it or not, the kids aren’t doing collages of Bridgen’s stinking Leicestershire vegetable distribution hub, or Boris Johnson’s lockdown cheese-and-wine work non-party. They’re making murals of Marcus Rashford.

To be fair, Truss didn’t write Britannia Unchained alone. Her co-authors were: the thinking woman’s thug Kwasi Kwarteng, Boris Johnson’s brutish Golem-enforcer, who spent a November press round trying to bully parliamentary standards commissioner Kathryn Stone into resigning, unaware that focus-polling at CCHQ had already decided to ditch Owen Paterson, leaving Kwarteng looking like a gormlessly obedient snap-on tool, both fanatically loyal and fatally un-looped; Dominic Raab, who lasted four months as Truss’s Exiteer predecessor, having revealed he didn’t know where Calais was, defended the Tories’ falsified online independent fact checking service during the 2019 election, and floated about on a paddle board during the rout of Kabul, like the devil made flesh by Silvia Pinal in a Luis Buñuel film; Priti Patel, who was bailed out personally by Boris Johnson when she breached the ministerial code for bullying, and threatens regulations against dying drowning children, Darth Vader pointing the Death Star at Alderaan; and Chris Skidmore, the MP for Kingswood, only known at all because a covert 2019 investigation into the Westminster laundry service by Vice magazine found Skidmore to have more skids in his pants than any other politician, a nominatively determined quirk which Andrew Bridgen secretly envied. Everything that is awful about the modern Conservative party is embodied by Truss’s collaborators in Britannia Unchained, which should make her a perfect fit for the Wicker Woman’s flaming frame.

Britannia ashamed requires a sacrifice. So far, the role of Chief Negotiator for Exiting the European Union has claimed five victims, six if you remember that David Davis did it twice, having forgotten that he’d already done it all wrong once already. Nothing is achieved. Another body goes up in flames, the carcass shunted into another cabinet position. The peasants dance and sing, and wait out the winter.