Discussing the drama of Britain’s ground-shifting vote to withdraw from the European Union on National Public Radio this week, a Washington interviewer reminded his American listeners that the popular Machiavellian TV series House of Cards was originally set in Westminster, seat of the British parliament. It was even written by a Conservative party apparatchik whose real-life successors have rapidly outstripped his fiction.  “We always thought your West Wing was a bit idealistic,” NPR’s on-air guest in London interjected.  The Brexit majority was made up of disaffected Britons who feel they are always the losers amid globalization and the migrant flows into their communities. They are political first cousins to Donald Trump’s angry army.  What the small-screen comparison highlights is a striking difference of styles and process. For all their cynicism and disdain for politicians, many Americans still hanker for Aaron Sorkin’s parallel universe where President Josiah Bartlet strives to do the right thing. Most of them (not you, Candidate Trump) still respect the US constitution and all its nit-picking, gridlocked legal niceties. It protects them from each other.  But supposedly old-school Brits, whose general election campaigns formally last a mere three weeks, have no such written constitution, no formal separation of the powers of government. So they can move very fast when they have to act.  British voters want to restore some certainty to their lives after the 52-48% vote to abandon the EU. What will it mean in practice? Some want to sever ties with the continent immediately – hardly practical – especially to curb the immigrant flow. Others are aghast and demand a second referendum to reverse the result. That is as likely as a rematch of the English football team’s humiliating mid-week defeat by tiny Iceland (population 330,000) in the European Championship, a sporting Brexit no one wanted.  In Britain there is no constitutional check on such a momentous decision taken by a slim majority; no formal ratification by two-thirds of the states, as required for changes to the US constitution; no 60% threshold needed to pass. It has been enough to make the breakaway SNP government in Edinburgh threaten a veto which is beyond its powers and to seek to open direct talks with Brussels to stay inside the EU – for which it voted – but leave the UK.  As for Britain’s spurned EU partners – who met without a UK chair at the top table this week for the first time in 43 years – they are icily displeased, but not yet at the bunny-boiling stage. That may yet come if the whole EU starts to unravel – as it might, despite Barack Obama’s appeal for calm reasonableness.  No one knows how best to proceed and keep collateral damage to a minimum, and officials who might have opened informal back channels to explore options have been instructed by EU commission president Jean-Claude Juncker not to do so. The situation cries out for someone to take charge. But who?  Within hours of his defeat at breakfast time on Friday 24 June, David Cameron, who had earlier declared himself “not a quitter”, signalled his resignation. Someone else would have to sort out the mess which he devised – but which failed to deliver his desired results. He could have hung on, but many parliamentarians – MPs in the House of Commons and unelected peers in the House of Lords – had made clear their loss of confidence and their anger over his failed referendum strategy.  As candidates for the vacancy at 10 Downing Street came forward – a process which will take until 9 September – parliamentarians then derailed the career of Cameron’s most likely successor.  Despite fronting the campaign to leave the EU and being “most trusted” by voters on the issues, the former London mayor Boris Johnson was judged by intimate insiders not to be up to the task of negotiating complex Brexit agreements, his heart not really in it either. It is an open secret that Johnson hesitated before deciding which side to back, and had expected the one he finally chose to lose the referendum. That would have eased his path to the eventual succession as a plucky loser. Instead he looked shattered when it turned out he wasn’t.  With brisk efficiency, New York-born Johnson was duly stabbed in the back by Michael Gove, his more zealous friend and campaign colleague. Johnson heard the news of his campaign manager’s usurpation by text message like everyone else just before he was due to announce his own candidacy. He blinked and withdrew. As for the earnest and bespectacled Gove, with Rupert Murdoch’s backing, he is now running hard for the top job he has repeatedly said he never wanted.  Not so much a Hamlet as a Macbeth. His wife, the Fleet Street columnist Sarah Vine, even auditioned for Lady Macbeth when an email, helpfully setting out Johnson’s leadership failings and written in her trenchant professional style, was accidentally sent to the wrong person and quickly appeared in the press. Well, well, bad luck.  If the drama of “Tories in Turmoil” was not a sufficiently strong plotline to keep viewers tuned into this real life Game of Card Sharps, the opposition Labour party was similarly convulsed by the unexpected Brexit result.  Labour’s leftwing party leader, Jeremy Corbyn, was elected only in 2015 by a Bernie Sanders-style upsurge among party activists. This week, he saw more than half his senior colleagues resign their posts and back a parliamentary vote of no confidence (by 170 MPs to 40) in his leadership.  Corbyn’s offence? Ostensibly his failure to campaign hard enough or with conviction and rally Labour’s core voters to back the remain (in the EU) campaign. Given Corbyn’s history as an anti-EU leftist for decades, there was even doubt as to whether he voted remain himself on 23 June. Up to one-third of Labour voters peeled off to Ukip, the populist voice of latent English nationalism and leading leave campaigners.  Underlying it is the belief among Corbyn’s fellow Labour MPs that their leader has neither the ambition nor the capacity to win the premiership or run Britain. In triple election winner Tony Blair’s phrase, Corbyn is a Chavista protest politician out in the street with a placard demanding “Blair Must Go” for making unpopular decisions. Since Sir John Chilcot’s much delayed report into the Iraq war is due to be published on 6 July, Corbyn’s view that Blair is a war criminal may yet feed into the wider drama.  But Corbyn’s shortcomings and beliefs – even his late-career U-turn to offer token support to the remain campaign – paled into nothing compared with the Brexit leadership’s instant disavowal of key planks in their successful campaign.  Ukip’s leader, the populist ex-Tory Nigel Farage, disowned the £350m a week figure that Brexit slogans had promised would be saved from Britain’s EU contributions. Back to being a self-styled “liberal internationalist” after conniving with his campaign’s xenophobia, Johnson insisted that immigration – running at 330,000 a year net – had not been the major campaign issue at all.  Others airily declared that Brexit might not mean a cut in immigration numbers at all. If continued free movement of Polish plumbers and Spanish waiters to work in Britain (where unemployment is 5%, half what it is in southern EU states) was the price the UK must pay to keep free access to EU markets, it would be worth paying.  That is not the message blue collar Britain wanted to hear, not its champions in Fleet Street’s tabloid newspapers, who had spent months accusing the remain campaign of running “Project Fear” about the risks of leaving the EU and now detected a plot to stall – or even reverse – the Brexit result.  They also saw the hand of Cameron and his finance minister and ally George Osborne in efforts to prevent Johnson – a fellow graduate of elite Eton College and Oxford – from winning the coming leadership contest. As things have turned out, Gove did the job for them.  Looming much larger than Westminster’s personality politics should be how to negotiate Brexit without too much mutual damage or contagion throughout the EU’s single currency eurozone, where populist parties are now thriving thanks to globalization and economic mismanagement. Led by France’s National Front, several have called for their own Brexit-style ballots. Nato cohesion and other collateral issues will have to wait.  But there is no road map. Cameron does not have one and nor do the Brexit leaders, who offer only rival theories. France’s unpopular president François Hollande, facing election defeat next year, demands Britain go quickly. Germany’s calmer Angela Merkel is more cautious but makes clear there can be no great generosity to a state which has chosen to leave.  At this stage, it is hard to see how blithe British promises that the UK can have both market access and a brake on inward migration can be achieved. Wriggle room is visible, but it will require statesmanship and good will. All sides face domestic pressures from voters. London markets and sterling have dipped, recovered, dipped again, all week. Objectively the UK economy’s trade deficit and budget deficit – this week Osborne again put back his target date to close the post-2008 budget hole – make it vulnerable.  There are opportunities here too, say the optimists. “We must make the best of it,” say realists. Both sides are right. Gove promises to fix it and find an extra £5bn a year for Britain’s heathcare system (the NHS) in the process. He is uncompromising on capping immigration. But how will it be done?  US Democrats who follow Labour politics and rightly fear that the Brexit mood may have a negative impact on Hillary Clinton’s White House hopes may care to know that the party’s MPs are trying to find a single candidate behind whom to fight a contest among activists (the ones with the votes) to unseat Corbyn. Buoyed by Sanders-style enthusiasts, Corbyn is refusing to budge. Certain that their cause is just, both he and Sanders resist political imperatives that are clear to others.  As of Friday night, Labour’s tentative choice may be Angela Eagle, a clever woman with a working-class background, an Oxford degree and a passion for serious chess which she shares with her twin sister, Maria, also a senior Labour MP. In the age of identity politics, aficionados may also wish to know that Maria is straight and Angela (older by 15 minutes) is gay.  It might just work. But Angela Eagle is not the female candidate voters are as interested in as they might be if Labour was in better political shape when the governing Tories are in such trouble. That woman is Theresa May, 59, quietly competent home secretary in Cameron’s cabinet since 2010.  She backed remain in the referendum campaign but took little part and has made neither a fuss nor a secret of her ambition to be the “next Margaret Thatcher”. Reserved and private, married to a fellow banker who avoids the limelight, she is the dull choice when set against Boris Johnson and even Gove, with whom she has clashed over policy and usually won. Her one indulgence seems to be flamboyant shoes, much loved by photographers.  The obvious comparison, which admirers are keen to make, is with Europe’s helmswoman in the prolonged crisis, Chancellor Merkel of Germany. Merkel is diligent and steady. Like May, she is the child of a clergyman, childless and married to a quietly supportive partner. She does not make a fuss, but commands respect rather than hero worship.  Related: Tory party leadership race: the road ahead  There are three other candidates, Liam Fox, Stephen Crabb and Andrea Leadsom, but unless the conventional wisdom is wrong (it has been so often in 2016), the fight will be between Gove and May. Will party activists back the self-styled ideas man whom Cameron affectionately described as a bit of a Maoist in his determination to take on vested interests? Or the competent woman who doesn’t make a fuss but dares to tackle police inefficiency and corruption?  Just 48 hours ago, Boris Johnson was expected to win easily. Few who knew the clever, lazy, disorganised loner with shambolic box office appeal – known always as Boris, never Johnson – well think his removal is anything but good news for the serious pursuit of national goals in tough times. The result will be less fun, but may better suit a serious public mood.  Boris read classics at Oxford and knows well the fate of demagogues in the ancient world who aroused the hopes and passions of the common man and woman, then failed to deliver.  His own paternal great-grandfather, a Turkish politician called Ali Kemal, was beaten to death for being on the wrong side in the turmoil of the Ottoman Empire’s breakup after 1918. The thought may weigh heavily on him – as it should other populists seeking the path ahead in our dangerous times.  Dull is good, as Syrians can confirm.
From Labour infighting to the end of Boris Johnson, the shocking EU referendum result set into motion a series of events that no one could have predicted