LONDON — After his stinging defeat in his first parliamentary vote on Brexit, Prime Minister Boris Johnson of Britain faced more setbacks on Wednesday, as opposition lawmakers promised to complicate his plan for the swift general election that many believe he wanted all along.

The day’s events unfolded against a developing consensus among Mr. Johnson’s opponents that he may have overplayed his hand through hardball tactics, devised by his adviser Dominic Cummings, a leading strategist in the main pro-Brexit campaign during the 2016 referendum.

The risk is that the Europe question could destroy Mr. Johnson’s premiership just as it did for every previous Conservative prime minister in recent memory, but more rapidly.

Another product of Mr. Johnson’s take-no-prisoners approach has been an erosion of trust. While he needs the Labour Party’s votes to reach the two-thirds threshold required in Parliament to call an election, its leaders are deeply suspicious of his motives.

The prime minister has said an election would take place on Oct. 15, but they worry that he will invent an excuse to move the date closer to the Oct. 31 deadline for leaving the European Union — or even after that — at the very least leaving no time for legislating after the balloting.

Determined not to “walk into a trap,” as the Labour spokesman on Brexit, Keir Starmer, said on Wednesday, the party is refusing to back Mr. Johnson’s call for an election until legislation ruling out a no-deal Brexit becomes the law of the land.

Mr. Starmer said Labour would not vote for an election on a promise from Mr. Johnson “that it will be 15 October — which we don’t believe.”

Having won control of the legislative agenda on Tuesday night, lawmakers planned to press ahead with the measure to rule out a no-deal Brexit. It is expected to pass, with the backing of a hefty 21 Conservative lawmakers who rebelled against Mr. Johnson’s Brexit plans.

Those Tory rebels were told immediately afterward that they no longer represented the party, depriving the government of a working majority and prompting a fierce backlash from internal critics, who pointed out that most of the current government ministers had broken with the party in previous Brexit votes without retribution.

However the wrangling in Parliament comes out in the coming days, most analysts believe that an election is inevitable in the near future after years of stalemate over Brexit, and is probably the only way to break the cycle of endless and fruitless debate.

There is also widespread agreement that the events of recent weeks have underscored the toxic lack of trust in Parliament, leaving British politics in an ever more bizarre state.

Mr. Johnson insisted that he did not want an election but was being forced into one and intended to seek it. Jeremy Corbyn, the opposition Labour leader, has been saying for two years that he wants an election, but is now preparing to block one.

The latest crisis was precipitated by Mr. Johnson’s decision last week to suspend the sittings of Parliament in September and October, a move that prompted claims that he was subverting the conventions of Britain’s unwritten constitution. It also prompted legal challenges, and on Wednesday a judge in Scotland ruled against a challenge seeking to invalidate Mr. Johnson’s decision to prorogue Parliament for five weeks.

His initial decision galvanized his critics in the Conservative Party who believed that Mr. Johnson’s intention was to unite Brexit supporters behind him ahead of an election, rather than to negotiate a new exit deal with the European Union.

The rebellion, and the purge of those Conservative members of Parliament, was the culmination of an escalation by Downing Street using unusually aggressive tactics. Some of the party’s best-known and most respected lawmakers were ejected from their political home, in some cases after decades of service.

Those disciplined include two former chancellors of the Exchequer: Philip Hammond, who held the post only a few weeks ago; and Kenneth Clarke, the longest-serving lawmaker in Parliament.

Out, too, went Nicholas Soames, grandson of Winston Churchill and the grandest and most colorful of the Tory grandees.

Another victim was Rory Stewart, the maverick former cabinet minister who enlivened the Conservative leadership contest that was finally won by Mr. Johnson in July.

“It came by text, and it was a pretty astonishing moment,” Mr. Stewart said of his expulsion from the Conservative parliamentary party. “Remember that only a few weeks ago I was running for the leadership of the Conservative Party against Boris Johnson and I was in the cabinet.”

“It feels a little like something that one associates with other countries: One opposes the leader, and one loses the leadership — no longer in the cabinet and now apparently thrown out of the party and apparently out of one’s seat, too,” he told the BBC.

Michael Howard, a former party leader loyal to Mr. Johnson, defended the purge and told the BBC that in a general election, any Conservative candidate for the party should support the leadership’s hard line on Brexit, suggesting that the party is determined to scoop up voters from Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party.

“Everyone has to know with total clarity that if they vote Conservative and a Conservative government is elected, we will leave the E.U.,” Mr. Howard said.

But the immediate effect for the Conservatives has been traumatic, and has reduced the government’s working majority in Parliament to minus 43 from one.

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