If Mark Carney tires of governing the Bank of England he could always try celebrity ballroom dancing. It doesn’t matter that he is not famous beyond Westminster and the City of London. Ed Balls toiled at the unglamorous coalface of politics and finance, bravely overcoming the handicap of Oxford and Harvard degrees in economics to make it as a comedy hip-jiggler on prime time television.

Or Carney could keep his job but the format could change. The BBC could broadcast Strictly Come Quantitative Easing, in which Carney, dressed in white tie and tails, explains the finer points of monetary policy, after which Theresa May steers him to a panel of self-appointed Tory judges who pick apart his performance.

“Leaden, flat-footed – your interest rate is still too low,” says William Hague. “This is meant to be a Brexit dance,” tuts Daniel Hannan, “but your posture says remain.” “That emergency lift after the referendum was far too independent,” opines Michael Gove. A key difference between this show and the original would be that the roles of expert and amateur are reversed. The real Strictly judges can dance.

On the Brexit channel expertise is a real turnoff, the timid shuffle of a wallflower establishment. To identify technical obstacles on the path to freedom is to counsel continuing captivity. Don’t study the steps, feel the beat! Delicate understatement is the signature move of central bankers, who can spook markets with a mistimed turn. That is why Carney’s intervention on the morning of 24 June was bold and controversial.

To recap: the country had just voted to leave the European Union, defying warnings by pretty much every democratically elected leader and serious financial institution in the world that doing so risked economic turmoil. The pound tanked.

David Cameron, who had promised not to resign if the vote went against him, resigned. The leaders of the leave campaign faced the nation with the solemn indignation of children whose Christmas present arrives in fiddly parts, batteries not included. Years of pester power had delivered a cherished gift to the Tory right, but they wanted someone else to make it work before they could play with it.

In the absence of British leadership, it fell to a Canadian technocrat to calm nerves. Carney told the world the UK economy was “resilient”, but that “a period of uncertainty and instability” could be expected. The Bank of England was making £250bn of funds available to cushion the shock. As the first grownup on the scene, Carney made the Brexiteers look small and weak on their special day. He strode across the fragments of their brittle campaign boasts, and they hate him for it.

Some hate him also for having been recruited by George Osborne. The former chancellor occupies a demonic role in the cult of Brexit. He deployed the power of the Treasury to make the case for remain. He activated his network of allies in parliament and brandished his power of patronage to the same end, hinting at preferment for those who stayed loyal to what was, after all, the official government position.

The present government is and isn’t the same one that sought to keep Britain in the EU. It has not been supplanted in a general election, but its purpose has been overwritten by plebiscite. So the prime minister has a misshapen mandate. She is constitutionally entitled to the job as the anointed Tory leader in command of a parliamentary majority, but that majority was won by a predecessor whose political project has burned to the ground. And May was a remainer.

To overcome the structural insecurity built into her position, May is embracing not just the goal of Brexit but its revolutionary ethos: the idea that 24 June was Day One of Year One of the New Era. Cameron has removed himself from the purgative line of fire. Osborne has not, which means that his legacy as chancellor – and his friends – are viewed with suspicion in No 10.

That is partly why May took a casual dig at the Bank of England in her party conference speech, fretting about the harmful consequences of low interest rates and quantitative easing, adding – in the tone of ominous imprecision that is becoming her trademark – that “change has got to come”.

I doubt she realised that this would be taken as a licence to kill by Carney’s would-be Tory assassins. She may not even have grasped how brazen a departure from protocol it was for a prime minister to tread on the Bank of England’s independence. She has no Treasury veterans in her immediate entourage to flag the danger. Her target was simply the past: the old order, Osborne’s shadow.

But for Brexit Bolsheviks, bent on total revolution, the Treasury itself is untrustworthy – a redoubt of obstructive pro-Europeanism that can mesmerise Philip Hammond with evidential hocus-pocus. John Redwood urges the chancellor to resist any fiscal stimulus based on “nonsensical” forecasts of a Brexit-related downturn predicated on “wacky figures”. Those figures are produced by the independent Office for Budget Responsibility. But that too is a pillar of the Osbornite architecture, ripe for demolition.

Liam Fox tells Hammond that his forthcoming autumn statement must not resemble a “George Osborne-style emergency budget”. Downing Street issues tepid statements of support for the chancellor, making it clear that her preferred position is enigmatic equidistance between the Treasury’s economic pragmatism and the ideological urgency of its enemies.

This is a natural continuation of the strategy that saw May rise stealthily to the top. She wanted to be prime minister long before she wanted Brexit, but she must now want Brexit all the more if she is to function as PM. She wants the referendum to be her mandate because it is fresher than the one on which she was elected.

As for how that mandate is to be fulfilled, she is happy for cabinet rivals to spin themselves breathless in competition over the detail, unconcerned if evidence and expertise are trampled underfoot while she hovers above the fray. In this bizarre game of Strictly Brexit, May wants to lift the glittering trophy but she doesn’t want to dance for it.

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