In the mounting tension and confusion with dissenting ministers, threatening partners and a rebellious party, which we optimistically call the government, I begin to detect three possibilities.
The first is that we crash out without reaching an agreement. This will trigger widespread disruption of everything, a plunge in asset values, especially housing, shortages, queues, a crisis in business and manufacturing, job losses and tax rises. In short it would be a self inflicted disaster which would bring about the collapse of the government and the massacre of the owners of the fiasco, the Tory party, at the following election. It will lead to likely Scottish independence, as shackled to a disaster, would hardly be the popular choice in a referendum in such circumstances. It will also lead to the detachment of Northern Ireland, which like Scotland voted to remain, into some kind re-union with the south, most likely as a self governing province. The UK would be England and a restive Wales. For all those reasons, in spite of her mantra that no deal is better than a bad deal, May knows she cannot go there. So does the DUP leader, Arlene Foster.
So this is her current plan. To agree, if unable to secure a long term agreement with the EU, to have the whole United Kingdom remain in the Customs Union, subject to all its rules, indefinitely. That will protect the economy, jobs and normal everyday life. The hard Brexiteers will go ballistic and those of them in the government will resign en masse. But May knows that the majority of both the Tory and Labour parties will back her, together with the SNP and the DUP as well as the majority in the House of Lords. And she knows too that in a second referendum, the alternative hard Brexit would lose big and if staying in were an option on the ballot paper, that would win comfortably overall.
The final possibility is that the government collapses quite soon and before anything can be formalised. Then it’s Corbyn.