He was magnificent. Ken Clarke spoke for saving Britain, and he spoke for the three-quarters of MPs who never supported this madness. But on his own benches he is the lone refuser, the only one who will vote today against what most of Clarke’s colleagues and almost all on the Labour benches know to be an approaching Brexit calamity.

Like a prophet crying in the wilderness – dismissed as “purple and quavery”, and his words as a “pitiful harrumph” in the Daily Mail – his speech will resonate down the Brexit years.

How did it come to this act of collective cowardice? Because rebelling against your own leadership is easy, and usually delights the voters with a show of sterling independence. But to rebel against the voters – that takes formidable courage.

Tories would surprise even Enoch Powell, says Kenneth Clarke Read more

“Now I’m being told I’m somehow an enemy of the people!” Clarke protested with outrage.

He had earned his right to make a sweeping dismissal of the referendum for the absurdity of such “an enormous question answered with a single yes or no on one day”, since he alone had voted against holding one. The real betrayal of voters, he said, was for MPs not to vote with their conscience and judgment.

With no notes, Clarke’s 17-minute tour de force was a history lesson about his generation. He has spent a political career spanning nearly 50 years hauling Britain into the modern world, rescuing it from its final “appalling” colonial disaster, Suez. We had no role once we had lost an empire, he said, and our economy “was becoming a laughing stock”.

As a young man he worked with Edward Heath, easing the country into the common market, where “our membership restored our national self-confidence”, “made us more valuable to our US allies” and more secure against Russia in the cold war.

But for Margaret Thatcher, he said, there would never have been a single market: it was her pressure that broke down those barriers – “and we benefited more than any other state”. Brexit is “baffling to every friend throughout the world”.

What we heard from him was a eulogy and an epitaph for the passing of an era where the European idea was the guiding light for all the enlightened liberals of his generation. Withering barbs aplenty he had for the turncoats who had suddenly seen “a light on the road to Damascus on the twenty-third of June. I’m afraid that light has been denied to me.”

Wise scorn was poured on that trading “wonderland” down the rabbit hole, where “nice men like President Trump and President Erdoğan” are “impatient to abandon their normal protectionism, queuing up to give us access to their markets”.

He ended with a priestly warning to the souls of the pro-EU MPs all around him: “As we see what unfolds hereafter as we leave the European Union, I hope the consciences of other MPs remain equally content.” The agonised wriggling and writhing of Labour and Tory remainers showed how well he twisted the knife.

The Commons will today vote overwhelmingly to trigger article 50, with the SNP, Liberal Democrats and some 35 Labour rebels holding out. Crucial amendments will not be passed at the next stage, and yet MPs will still vote to proceed. Remainers rely on the chance to vote at the end of the process, when the public finally stares a hard Brexit in the face and confronts what that really means. But even the right to hold that vote before the deal is sealed looks doubtful.

The mad zeal of the Europhobes, still astounded that their small cult has swept the country, had full rein yesterday. Jacob Rees-Mogg proclaimed this moment stood with Agincourt and Waterloo; most MPs know this is Dunkirk.

Meanwhile, Labour’s leavers disgraced themselves again: Gisela Stuart pleaded for EU residents to be allowed to remain – but why didn’t she insist on that first? Kate Hoey claimed the Brexiters were not anti-immigrant, but fewer people coming from the EU meant a fairer chance for those from further afield. As if!

As the shadowy shape of new alliances emerged, there were great cheers for Clarke from the Labour benches. The Conservative Anna Soubry sounded briefly like one of them, voting “with a heavy heart”, believing “history will not be kind to this parliament”.

The divide between remainers and leavers looks sometimes deeper than party tribes on this the most important event since the last war. Are tectonic plates shifting?

Parties must work together to stop the UK falling off a Brexit cliff edge | Caroline Lucas Read more

I suspect not really. Splendid though Ken Clarke is on all things European, he is a Tory to the tips of his Hush Puppies. As chancellor in the 90s his austerity was brutal, leaving a legacy of public squalor and an attitude towards parsimony that forced Gordon Brown to follow that disastrous path for two more years. As Thatcher’s health secretary, it was he who marketised the NHS, fatally splitting it between purchasers and providers.

Nonetheless, as Tories go, he is the best: too good for them, rejected as leader three times in favour of duds, including Iain Duncan Smith. He opposed the Iraq war. As lord chancellor, he was “astonished” at a prison population of 85,000, and set about reducing it. He called Cameron’s proposed bill of rights “xenophobic and legal nonsense”. With his joyful hinterland of jazz and motor racing, he is a rare politician who talks humanly, though he is almost impossible to interview on television due to his never-ending sentences.

This was no farewell. Clarke will be here all through this terrible Brexit process, warning, admonishing, mocking and doing his damnedest to avert this act of national lunacy.