Attributions vary, but Dick Tuck (losing in California to Richard Nixon) is often credited with being the first politician to have said “the people have spoken, the bastards”. Oddly enough, a similar response might be proposed for the complete shambles this week in the Commons on the question of a referendum on the Lisbon treaty. Our political parties were all over the place. They represented us beautifully.

“The people?” you may retort. “Have we spoken? This particular circus was composed of politicians alone.” And on the face of it you would be right. All three main parties made fools, or knaves, or both, of themselves. “The people”, so far as they noticed at all, probably disapproved.

Nick Clegg, the Liberal Democrat leader, ended up in such a tangled knot as to put a professional contortionist to shame. He made the mistake of seeking a position around which his party could unite. Since, on Europe, Liberal Democrats are not united, this involved the dishonesty of calling for “a referendum” on EU membership (but not the referendum in question) plus a too-clever-by-half attempt to present abstention as a positive statement. As I discovered myself when I was a backbencher, your audience rarely invests principled abstention with the nobility you hoped they would discern. Most people think it a contradiction in terms. The hilarity Mr Clegg attracted was predictable.

The Conservatives were lucky. They deserved a more critically raised eyebrow than they got. Through the device of a “free” vote was not really free, and some ingenious footwork on the opposition whips' partly distracting backbenchers from a Eurosceptic motion that many of them would have supported, David Cameron escaped the headlines. But a cleverly suppressed rebellion that, had it surfaced, would have been the largest Mr Cameron has faced, has not escaped quiet notice.

Labour got off lightly. Their revolt had been overhyped, so Lib Dem woes made better stories. The real potential damage to Labour could lie in the breach of promise that sparked the debate in the first place. The electorate fast forget individual instances, and may forget this one, but a picture of evasiveness in a leader is built subliminally upon such evidence.

As for voting patterns overall, the website revolts.co.uk records in finer detail than I have space for the total intellectual mess that Wednesday's votes and confused half-rebellions reveal. This was a shabby, conflicted night, full of ambiguities and contradictions, and shot through with embarrassment.

And thus, I say, the people have spoken. For here was as eloquent a representation as you could wish for of the British electorate's anguished muddle over Europe. This country's half-hopes and half-fears about the EU, our mistrust and dither, our flirtation and our sabre-rattling, and our last-minute tendency to shy at Euro-fences, was perfectly reproduced in vignette in our House of Commons. MPs did their job this week. They raggedly failed to agree to stop - rather than reached any full-hearted agreement to carry on with - the European project.

If you doubt our own complicity, as an electorate, in our MPs' Euro-muddle, ask yourself not whether Mr Clegg was wise to try to fudge, but why he felt he needed to. Because his party gets hundreds of thousands of votes for being the most internationalist of the mainstream parties, and this has drawn many, including many of its own MPs, into the party. But in seats in the West Country, where the party is hanging on, there are hundreds of thousands of votes for the politics of Euroscepticism. The electorate, not Mr Clegg, created this dilemma.

And before you criticise the Tories for their MPs' repeated relapses into squabbling over Europe, ask why a party whose stance on so many big issues of principle is easy to guess gets votes (and draws MPs) from right across the spectrum of opinion on Europe. Voters (and Tory selection committees) could dispatch pro or anti-European Tory MPs if they wanted to. They almost never do.

Polls show that Labour voters too are fragmented on the European question. Historically, so is their party. The incumbency of government may have helped to discipline the parliamentary ranks this week, but do not forget who was behind British Europeanism's biggest setback since Britain joined the Common Market: it was Gordon Brown who changed his mind about joining the euro. I do not agree with Peter Riddell that Mr Brown has now placed himself firmly on a pro-European plinth. When the wind blows the other way it will blow him off it again.

The wind comes from the electorate. British voters send their representatives cruelly mixed messages on Europe. We always have. Blame us. We have seriously messed with our politicians' minds.

Now I must answer an obvious objection to my analysis. Electorates regularly disagree among themselves - and on many of the biggest questions. Clashes of voters' interests are the very stuff of politics; and parties must choose which groups to appeal to. Naturally, politicians would like to have their cake and eat it, but they can't. So on Europe, too, aren't we right to deride parties that cannot decide where they stand?

To this I reply that - despite polls and despite the evidence of a million angry dinner-party arguments - the European question does not put a line right down the middle of Britain: it divides each of us within our own breast. That is why “typical” Tory, Labour or Lib Dem voters are not typically pro or anti-Europe. The minority who tell pollsters they rate the issue high in their political priorities are the minority who have settled the argument in their own breasts. But most of us are to a greater or lesser degree torn; and though in pollsters' tick boxes we may fall variously into Yes, No and Don't Know, the truth is we flip-flop this way or that depending on mood, suspect it probably matters a lot, but aren't sure what to think.

The extremists on both sides therefore dominate the debate and sometimes intimidate the politicians. But most MPs remain viscerally aware that much of the British public is unnerved by these extremists even while (sometimes) claiming to share their views. Unsure of the strength of our own opinion, we are not giving our party leaders much of a steer; and when we do, steering the Conservative Party (as we did a few years ago) into one of its Europhobic phases, we then betray them by not voting for them on the grounds that they seem fanatical.

And I back this wisdom of crowds. At the point in history where we stand, a little offshore, at the beginning of the 21st century, with America flailing and Europe bumbling, “ho-hum, let's wait and see” is the right answer for Britain, and may be perfectly sustainable for decades. So in the Commons there are bodges, fudges, farces, advances and retreats, and division-lobby shambles galore still to come.

MPs do listen, you know; and on Europe the people have indeed spoken. They have said “er”. They will keep saying “er”. Quite right too.

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