Leavers don’t actually want to leave

When intelligent, informed and rational people make a choice that onlookers can see confounds their own declared interests, we are wise to look to psychiatry for an explanation. This is where my thoughts turn, now that Tory Brexiteers have conspired to block Theresa May’s road from Chequers to the deal the Commons so spectacularly rejected this week.

Until the last minute, I hesitated to accept the Tories’ European Research Group would join this rebellion. Cautiously I inserted ‘probably’, ‘by all accounts’ and ‘apparently’ into every column I drafted. That hardline Brexiteers would in the end want to kill the Prime Minister’s deal didn’t make sense.

We Remainers have been unable to believe our luck. Even as Leavers have crossed their hearts and hoped to die, even as David Davis, then Boris Johnson, then Dominic Raab, sacrificed their own cabinet seats to try to stop her, I’ve held my breath and thought, ‘If it hasn’t dawned on them yet, it surely will: they’re imperilling their own project.