My article last week was entitled “Four days to save the United Kingdom.” Yet recent days turned out to be mind-bogglingly more dramatic than anticipated.

Prime Minister Boris Johnson was outflanked by oppositionists and rebels from his own party, who seized control of the House of Commons (ahead of Johnson’s bid to close Parliament down), and forced through legislation preventing him from crashing Britain out of Europe without a deal. Such was the enormity of his defeat that Johnson immediately sought fresh elections. However, the opposition — opting to hold Johnson’s feet in the fire a few weeks longer — will block elections until they can guarantee that the deeply mistrusted PM doesn’t subvert the law and impose a no-deal Brexit. The options for Johnson (who says he’d rather be “dead in a ditch” than delay Brexit) are so lamentable that he may be forced to resign or call a vote of no-confidence against himself — if his own party doesn’t throw him out first. Senior legal experts, including former Attorney General Dominic Grieve (another rebel), warned that Johnson “could be sent to prison” if he ignored Parliament’s bill.

Johnson’s Conservative colleagues were particularly infuriated by his “Stalinist” purge of 21 MPs who voted to block no deal and the ruinous economic consequences it would have entailed. The defrocked parliamentarians included veteran ministers and grandees like Philip Hammond, Kenneth Clarke, Alistair Burt, and Nicholas Soames, a grandson of Winston Churchill.

This purge is symptomatic of the party’s lurch toward the populist right: Mutating from being the party of economic rectitude, the rule of law and traditional moral values to a brash, financially incontinent entity with a Trumpian grasp of honesty and ethics. It is now led by a narrow cabal of misogynistic, convention-burning Etonians who treat Parliament’s centuries of tradition with naked contempt.

Just as Donald Trump’s early presidency took its ideological bearings from white supremacist guru Steve Bannon, Johnson’s hatchet man is Dominic Cummings — widely reviled as the architect of Johnson’s kamikaze no-deal strategy. Senior Conservatives are ferociously denouncing him as a menace to the party.

Even populist right-wing newspapers took a few moments away from their tireless onslaughts against hard-left Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn to lampoon Johnson’s successive forced errors, including several excruciatingly awful speeches. Johnson’s own brother has resigned from government, citing “irreconcilable differences” between family and national interest.

It is too early to proclaim that Johnson’s brand of Trumpian populism has died in a ditch — there are still scenarios where he could survive a forthcoming election. Yet tragicomic misfires have thus far rendered British populism an increasingly unpalatable brand. And good riddance.

While in Italy recently, I witnessed equally far-reaching political realignments, which saw the extreme right — personified by Matteo Salvini — thrown out of government. Just weeks previously, Salvini had appeared to be an unstoppable force who wasn’t just rewriting Italy’s political map, but was working to transform the European continent into a hostile environment for immigrants, minorities and law-abiding citizens. In Austria, Poland, Germany, Slovakia and Spain, populism is likewise increasingly on the defensive.

My first experience of elections was in Beirut, where my husband voted on my behalf (with my consent), for his uncle. I was left with the distasteful impression that politics was all about nepotistic cliques protecting vested interests. How Lebanon has changed.

“Far-right populism wasn’t invented in 2016, but it has burst into flames with disconcerting rapidity.”

Baria Alamuddin

When the civil war propelled me to the UK, as a journalist I visited the Houses of Parliament to observe parliamentary sittings. I was invigorated by passionate debates over life-and-death issues. I accompanied Foreign Secretary Geoffrey Howe during one election campaign. Despite the grandness of his office, Howe and his wife dutifully went round knocking on doors and delivering leaflets, while citizens unabashedly criticized his government (mostly in a respectful manner). This was democracy in action — light-years from anything I’d witnessed in the Middle East.

Far-right populism wasn’t invented in 2016, but it has burst into flames with disconcerting rapidity. It is repellent not just for its nativist xenophobia, but also for its subversion of the values necessary for a flourishing democratic society: Accountability, mutual respect and common decency. However, the Conservatives’ rightward plunge would have been inconceivable without Corbyn dragging the Labour Party to the extreme left fringes of militancy, anti-Semitism and rudderless unelectability.

Trump, Johnson, Vladimir Putin and Benjamin Netanyahu have, between them, faced accusations of almost every conceivable form of political impropriety — short of shooting someone dead on Fifth Avenue, as Trump famously boasted he could get away with. We have entered an age of impunity, defined by Russian fake news troll armies, shamelessly dishonest, expletive-ridden partisan attacks, and the demise of effective mechanisms of international justice.

To cap off the UK government’s week of humiliation, the Iranian oil tanker the British authorities (ignoring protests from the US) released after Tehran pledged that it wouldn’t violate sanctions against the Assad regime has turned up off the Syrian coast. Iran has furthermore not released the British tanker it illegally impounded. It also continues to detain several innocent British-Iranian dual nationals. Johnson’s strategy of “taking back control” has left Britain friendless and alone in the world, at the mercy of hostile, third-rate pariah states.

Johnson has proved there are limits to what lies and unconstitutional actions citizens will swallow. Netanyahu may conceivably face electoral defeat next week, and possibly jail on multiple corruption charges. Salvini is under investigation as his party allegedly sought dirty Russian money. Even Fox News ridiculed Trump last week after he used a map that had been doctored with a marker pen to prove his claim that Alabama had been in the path of Hurricane Dorian.

For generations with no living memory of Nazism, we must relearn why the jingoistic politics of thuggish demagoguery paves the way to civilizational demise. Britain’s Parliament last week won several crucial battles against populist isolationism — but there is a long war ahead of us.

Baria Alamuddin is an award-winning journalist and broadcaster in the Middle East and the UK. She is editor of the Media Services Syndicate and has interviewed numerous heads of state.