Remainers want sober reasoning. Here’s some: we’re leaving, so let’s get it right

Brexit is moving forward much faster than its opponents are prepared to admit or accept

One must understand the psychology of Remainers. They do not object only to the result of last year’s referendum. They also object to the referendum full stop. They blame David Cameron for letting people decide Leave or Remain in the polling booth. The matter was too “immensely complicated”, they say, to put before poor silly voters.

Professor Richard Dawkins is only the latest. On the BBC Today programme yesterday, he explained that letting us vote gave “a great opportunity for emotion to cloud the issue”. How much better it would have been, he argued, if our European future had been decided through “sober reasoning by people who have really looked into the evidence both ways”.

This view helps explain the Remainers’ current behaviour. Although they dare not say it outright, their inner thought is that the referendum is invalid. The 17.4million who voted Leave were not in a position to do so, because they lacked the superb, evidence-based rationality of people like Richard Dawkins.

So these sober-reasoning Remainers feel justified in throwing into the works whatever spanners come to hand. This week, it is the preposterous demand by the new Irish prime minister, Leo Varadkar, nervous of Sinn Fein back home, that the British/ Irish border must be moved, postbrexit, into the Irish Sea, thereby putting Northern Ireland on the wrong side of it. Next month, while most of the country retires for a well-earned August rest from the exhausting politics of the past year, they will find something else.

The cumulative effect is confusing, both at home and abroad. Continental elites, whose main British sources of information are the BBC, the Financial Times and the Economist, are led to think that the whole thing is a populist bad dream. They imagine that the Establishment – which is even more powerful in their countries than in ours – will find a way of preventing it. So they tend not to focus on the reality of the current negotiations.

British voters have access to wider sources; but they too are inundated with gloomy prognostications. Some of these come from Conservative Cabinet ministers demoralised by the result of the general election. Who, for example, can find any hopeful note in the words of Philip Hammond, our Chancellor of the Exchequer? Just now, Liam Fox seems to be the only one offering an attractive future of free trade.

Remainer refusal to accept what is happening makes it difficult to recognise how irreversible matters are. What would it now take for Britain not to leave the EU in 2019? In legal terms, it would require the repeal of Article 50 and the dropping or defeat in Parliament of the European Union (Withdrawal) Bill. Article 50 cannot simply be abandoned, because it has been triggered. We would therefore have to leave and apply to rejoin the European Union. This application would have to be agreed by all the member states. They could easily refuse. Even if they accepted, there is little reason to suppose that we would be allowed to keep our opt-out from the euro or our budgetary rebate. We’d be beggars, not choosers.

In political terms, there would have to be a new prime minister, a new general election – perhaps a second referendum too. The new prime minister would have to go to the country saying, “Vote for me, thus overturning your previous vote. I shall then go to Brussels on your behalf, and surrender.” It is not tempting.

Besides, who could it be? Obviously not Theresa May. Almost certainly not any Tory, since the abandonment of Brexit would destroy the Conservatives’ unity and reputation. Probably not Jeremy Corbyn. He is a Brexiteer himself. He understands very well how a victory for Remainers in his party would mark the return of Blairism and the end of him.

So it is almost certainly not going to happen. What could happen, however, is that we negotiate a much worse deal than we otherwise would because of all the dismal things the Remainers remoan about.

Think of that phrase “cliff-edge”. It is a metaphor designed to inspire fear. We are standing on high ground, it suggests, and now we are going to tumble off it, falling to death or injury on the rocks beneath. Some of us might prefer the metaphor of leaving an open prison. Yes, we will need help with adjusting to freedom, but freedom is what it will be.

Our cards are quite good. The first is that we are – by vote and by law – leaving, so we cannot ultimately be stopped. The second is that the EU will lose our payments (12 per cent of its available resources), and is therefore frightened. It may well be prudent for us to pay quite a high price to get out, but it is not a legal or moral necessity. The third is that the EU needs our business. Eighty per cent of European capital market transactions, for example, are made in the City of London, because of the liquidity. London’s loss would be New York’s gain, not Europe’s. Last year, the EU’S trade surplus with Britain grew by £9billion to nearly £72billion. The Germans want to keep selling us their cars. All of them want to keep our custom.

So while we don’t want the break to be violent, we do need it unambiguously to happen. If we fudge this, we will get a worse deal – which perhaps, at a subconscious level, is what some Remainers want.

If we remain indefinitely in the customs union after 2019, for instance, we are signalling to American trade negotiators that a US trade deal can go lower down the pile. We should certainly accommodate the rights of EU citizens already in Britain, but on no account should we accept the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice to do this. We may well want quite large numbers of new immigrants after 2019, but not under rules which we cannot control.

Amid all the acrimony, it is a relief to report that, outside Westminster and what used to be called Fleet Street, people are getting on with it. Paul Hardy is Brexit director of the global law firm Dla-piper. “Brexit,” he says, “has moved from the surreal to the real. I have to apply logic to the situation. There is a logic to it.” His company advises businesses how to adjust, and tries to work out what the best form of transition would be.

The Legatum Financial Services Forum speaks for the key financial services players not represented by the mainly overseas (and therefore conflicted) international banks. It reports no signs of panic: Forex trading in the City rose 10 per cent in the past year. The Forum’s clients don’t want the “cliff-edge”, but even that can be dealt with. The acronym Batna (Best Alternative to a Negotiated Agreement) is in common use. By definition, Batna is a word for a possible way through, not a description of disaster.

All great enterprises involve difficulty. In most of them, the pain comes before the gain. Brexit will probably be no different in that respect. But sober reasoning – apologies to Dawkins – suggests there can be no gain, and will certainly be more pain, in trying to impede what has already been decided. We just need a few more cheerful people in positions of power shouting, “Come on out! The water’s lovely.” FOLLOW Charles Moore on twitter @Charleshmoore; READ MORE at telegraph.co.uk/opinion