Can sensible people unite and ignore the Brexit headbangers on both sides?

Some of my best friends are hard Brexiteers, by which I mean that they cannot see what all the faffing about is for. Britain voted to leave, so just get on with it, they say, and leave in one go in March 2019. If necessary have no trading or regulatory arrangements with the EU for what happens afterwards, and there will be probably be a deal anyway. Business people are always moaning, they’ll adapt and figure a way round any obstructions. You have to break a few (British) eggs to make a (Spanish) omelette and so on. That’s the theory.

The only hard Brexiteers taking this position worthy of respect are those who have had this position all along and been honest about the consequences and disruption of a no deal WTO scenario. They are small in number, but they have been consistent. But for their position to be the practical and realistic way for the country to proceed now, with the talks at an impasse, the UK government would have had to spend the last year in a war-time frame of mind, preparing a detailed plan down to every last detail for what happens in the event of no deal.

For a number of reasons, that was not done, although quite a lot has been done by officials working flat out in DEXEU and the cabinet office. Extraordinarily, David Cameron and George Osborne banned any Whitehall planning for what happened if they lost the vote in 2016. Then post-referendum the design of DEXEU – handling negotiations and contingency – compounded the problem.

When I asked a senior person in the government recently whether someone is actually in charge of contingency the answer was troubling: “There are hundreds of people across government working on all sorts of papers and plans.”

That wasn’t what I asked. Who is the politician definitively in charge with nothing else on their plate? Who is the person with political authority across departments? The person – Mr or Mrs Contingency – with lists on their walls and a crack team going through every aspect of what needs doing, undistracted by whether or not there will be a deal just in case there is not. Once party conference is over, expect the relevant parliamentary committees to be with increasing urgency all over this. The answers had better be good.

The move of mandarin Olly Robbins in recent weeks out of DEXEU to be alongside the Prime Minister is a move meant to speed up preparations, but time is tight and 15 months have passed.

So, the hardest Brexit position depends on the brilliance of a contingency plan on customs, recognition of regulatory standards, ports, airports, car supply chains, which seems – at best, putting it politely – still a work in progress with officials involved but no political master able to cut through every department. David Davis’s focus is understandably mainly on the talks.

You might say none of this matters much, but you would be wrong and reckless to say that. With the clock ticking down we should be well beyond hearing glib assertions from over-confident Tory MPs of the old school about how everything will be ok and if it isn’t then there is a plan but they can’t tell you what it is because, well, there’s going to be a deal anyway. It is the updated Tory eurosceptic equivalent of “the Iraq War will be fine, of course there’s a plan.” There wasn’t.

That is, I’m afraid, where I lose patience with the hardest Brexiteers, my fellow advocates of Leave. Although it is late, they are clinging to comfort blankets, parroting the lines from old campaign events, the easy eurosceptic lines that got applause at Tory conference and from half the audience at Tory Association gatherings in recent decades. It just sounds silly now. Something more practical and realistic is in order, surely.

This was the subject of my column for The Times this week, making the case that business has already had to put up with the Tories branding them crooks in the ill-fated manifesto in the election. Now, business wants answers because it has to plan ahead and the months are flying by. It must deal in reality, in shipment regimes, and regulatory standards, and law, and contracts, trade, staffing and money.

The feedback on social media and elsewhere was fascinating. Quite a bit of it pointed out – fairly, although I have never made a secret of it – that I voted for Brexit. This is your mess; you and your cabal of liars must be punished; Brexit is impossible.

No, no, no, to borrow a phrase. The decision to leave was taken last year and must be abided by. It is as daft to say Brexit is impossible as to to say it is utopia. All sort of countries make their own laws and manage to trade and co-exist, be they Japan, Chile, Australia, Canada, the United States or India.

Both sides in the referendum told whoppers. I’ll trade you the NHS £350m (always bogus) for George Osborne’s (always bogus) punishment budget.

In my view, events since have vindicated the result. Jean-Claude Juncker’s speech last week was a reminder that even if he does not get everything he wants, this EU project is going, two steps forward and one step back, in an integrationist direction Britain cannot take and was never going to after the Maastricht experience in the early 1990s. The superb piece by Marina Wheeler QC in the latest Spectator (crisply written and clear on the EU and the ECJ in a way her husband Boris never manages to be) is another timely reminder that we are absolutely right to leave. Perhaps Marina should be Prime Minister next rather than Boris? Stranger things have happened.

Anyway, we are leaving the EU in 2019. The question is still how. Is it to be done in an orderly fashion – via a two year transition bridge and some compromises – or will it be a stupid and “brainless” (according to a minister) Brexit that bashes business via a crashing out?

If brainless Brexit is to be avoided and a deal done – which is there to be done – then that is going to take reasonable folk on the remain and leave side to make common cause against the hard Brexit headbangers and the fantasist Stop Brexit anti-democratic extremists. That should have happened from the start, in a meeting of moderate minds. Yet right from the morning after the referendum result the two camps dug themselves in deeper, meaning that too much of the conversation is still conducted according to the terms of reference dictated by the noisy extremes, one paranoid about the betrayal of Brexit and the other desperate to reverse the referendum. In the face of this futile conflict, a clear majority of voters in polling say they either want Brexit or accept that it is going to happen. Can sensible people unite and force compromise? It is an open question to which I hope the answer is yes, but I fear it may be no.