British politics is in crisis. Boris Johnson’s premiership has got off to a bad start. Losing six out of six parliamentary votes, wilfully giving up his parliamentary majority by ejecting 21 Tory MPs from his party for daring to disagree with him, a Cabinet Minister has resigned and a Tory MP defected while he was addressing the Commons.

Mr Johnson has now become the First Prime Minister in UK history found by a court of law to have lied to a monarch. To say his Government is in disarray would be a huge understatement.

MPs are in their constituencies when we should be at Westminster holding the UK Government to account and ensuring the Prime Minister is working in the best interests of the people, not just for himself and the extremists who have seized control of his party.

Since Mr Johnson became Prime Minister in July, the UK parliament has had only six sitting days, when MPs debate and scrutinise legislation, question the government and hold them to account. Westminster has now been prorogued until 14 October in a move that Scotland’s highest court, the Court of Session, has now ruled ‘unlawful.’

We are due to leave the European Union on October 31 and, as the law now stands, the Prime Minister must go to Brussels and ask for this deadline to be extended if he cannot agree a deal before then. There is little evidence that Mr Johnson is attempting to negotiate a new deal. Indeed his Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, Amber Rudd, dramatically resigned from his government last week saying she no longer believed that leaving with a deal was the government’s main objective.

Mr Johnson melodramatically said he would ‘rather be dead in a ditch’ than extend Brexit beyond 31 October. We are now unable to predict whether the Prime Minister intends to break the law preventing that or not.

The UK Government continues to insist that the decision to prorogue Parliament at this time of national crisis had nothing to do with Brexit, and that an unprecedented five week shut down of Westminster was entirely normal and not the brazen attack on parliamentary democracy it so clearly is.

The Court of Session ruled that Mr Johnson’s advice to the Queen and the prorogation is unlawful, and effectively null and void. Every day that Westminster remains suspended, democracy is shut down. This behaviour is more in line with the actions of a failed state slipping into tyranny, than what the UK should expect in 2019.

We have a Prime Minister who has been found to have acted deceitfully, who has lied to the Queen, attempted to stymie parliament, tried to avoid scrutiny to push through an huge change to the UK’s position in the world without adhering to the rule of law. He has no majority and no mandate. Once no deal has been avoided, if it can be, a general election will have to be called.

With the publication of the UK Government’s ‘Yellowhammer’ report, spelling out their planning assumptions, should the UK crash out of the EU without a deal, Westminster has urgent business to attend to. The report predicts rising food and fuel prices, disruption to medical supplies and public disorder. It is imperative that this does not happen.

If prorogation continues, the message from the Prime Minister clear; he is above the law and can unilaterally decide our future. History shows that is a very dangerous path.

Mr Johnson ran a Brexit campaign which broke UK electoral law. His shutting down of Westminster is illegal. Soon he will face the consequences.