A bad Brexit deal was inevitable

Well, what did you expect? I appreciate this is a question the Brexiteers are manifestly incapable of answering but that says more about their preconceived notions of what Brexit could reasonably deliver. It is a reflection, too, of the manner in which there have always been two different kinds of Brexit. 

There has been the Brexit of dreams and the Brexit of reality. The Brexit of psychology and the Brexit of technical policy detail. There has always been an obvious tension, to put it mildly, between these two positions and it is not anyone else’s fault that in pursuit of their dreams the diehard Brexiteers decided the detail could all be arranged to Britain’s supreme satisfaction and everyone else would fall into line. As the old saw has it, our boy was marching in step, everyone else was getting it wrong. 

But how could it have been otherwise? Delusion was baked-in from the start; from the very moment David Davis, king of the blusterers, declared: