Rudd -erless and still up s**t creek without a paddle.

It’s Monday, and there’s yet more crazy in the ever changing kaleidoscope of crap which is British politics. (Ex-)Cabinet Minister Amber Rudd has announced her resignation from the cabinet and from the Conservative party, citing the fact that Alexander Boris de Pfeffel Johnson is a lying toad who’s hell bent on turning the Conservative party into a bunch of right wing populist English nationalists. Which the rest of us have already known for quite some time, but thank you for catching up, Amber. Next week she will write an anguished column for the Guardian in which she tells us of her shock on discovering that Elvis is dead.

What has prompted her resignation is her disgust at the treatment of her 21 former colleagues who were unceremoniously expelled from the party last week by her erstwhile boss. Never mind Brexit. Never mind people who fear for their medications, putting food on the table or losing their sole source of income because of a no deal Brexit, 21 Tories have had to resign from the party - and now it's time for Amber to protest. That’s the real tragedy here.

But Amber is also concerned that she has seen little evidence that the government is actually working to get a deal. All she has witnessed behind the scenes is a government putting all its efforts into coping with a no-deal Brexit. This confirms what we’ve all known for ages. LBJ has no intention of getting a new deal from Brussels and is hell bent on a no deal exit in order to mop up the electoral threat from the Brexit party and ensure that he remains Prime Minister after a General Election. This is a revelation which is way up there with the news that Elvis is still dead.

But having been a bit churlish, let’s not be too churlish. Better late than never. Amber Rudd’s resignation is significant because it points to deep divisions running right through the heart of the Conservative party to its very highest levels; divisions which are not fixable. Politicians are used to internal party divisions. As shown time after time, the greatest enemy of your average politician is another politician within his or her own party, not the Opposition. However the Tory party is no longer capable of containing those divisions.

This is all the more striking because we are still in the early months of a new Prime Minister, one who has only faced the House of Commons for a week, and who in the normal run of things would still be enjoying a honeymoon period. At this stage in Theresa May’s leadership the Tory party were still hailing her as Thatcher 2.0. The meltdown of LBJ’s leadership within such a short period of time has led to serious questions about the future of the Conservative party. This is a party whose leader is allowing speculation to mount that he might break the law because it’s a political inconvenience for him. Citing the will of the people as an excuse to break the law is the first rule in the despot’s playbook. The Johnson government is very quick to accuse Jeremy Corbyn of being like a South American dictator, but they’re the ones who are behaving in a dictatorial manner. The MPs who voted for the law that LBJ is considering breaking were elected by those people whose will he cites.

On Sunday Dominic Raab, who always looks as though he's in a rage about something, took to the TV to inform us all that the Prime Minister is going to obey the letter of the law, but will “test its limits” as far as possible. Along the lines of, “Sorry officer, I wasn’t driving at 75 mph in a 20 mph zone, I was testing the limits.”

His partner in not-a-crime-at-all, Sajid Javid, told Andrew Marr that the Government would of course obey the law, but would not ask for an extension to Article 50. He didn’t reply when asked how the Prime Minister not asking the EU for an extension to Article 50 counts as obeying a law requiring the Prime Minister to ask the EU for an extension to Article 50. Instead he waffled on about trying to get that deal that everyone knows that LBJ is making no serious attempts to get.

However the truly gobsmacking thing here is that despite the complete meltdown of the Government, despite the fact that it is led by a blatant liar who is manifestly unfit for the job, the Conservatives are still well ahead in opinion polls asking about voting intention in the coming General Election. Where is the effective opposition? And why isn't Labour benefiting from the disarray? Why, with the country falling apart around our ears, do people still feel that a vote for Jezza could make things worse?

Everywhere you look in British politics, ever larger chasms are opening up. Something has to give. 

And lest anyone has any sympathy for Amber, just remember how illiberal she was as Home Secretary. She might have left the government but she was still heavily involved in the excesses of previous administrations. Some would say that her actions are too little, too late.