Brexit is now so gloomy, its mood music may be early Leonard Cohen

This should be a time of optimism – but, instead, we are mired in stultifying arguments and in-fighting

The Bank of England’s chief economist, Andy Haldane, says it is possible to gauge the mood of the nation from the music it is downloading on Spotify. What should we be listening to at the moment? Billie Holiday singing Gloomy Sunday, aka the Hungarian Suicide song? Or the early bedsit-angst works of Leonard Cohen?

It is hard to recall a more downbeat time in the national demeanour. Brexit has been turned into an enervating, morale-sapping exercise in making the best of a bad job. What should be a moment of renewal and optimism has been reduced to a barely comprehensible debate over various forms of customs arrangements. Here is the great divide: do you favour the New Customs Partnership (NCP) approach (closet Remainer); or are you a “highly streamlined, technologybased customs arrangement” supporter (true Brexiteer)?

This conundrum is due to be settled by the Cabinet’s Brexit committee today, though I am not holding my breath. Theresa May is said to favour the NCP option denounced as “cretinous” by Jacob Rees-mogg and which many Brexiteers regard as tantamount to staying in the EU. On the other hand, if her colleagues plump for the second option, that will look like a defeat for the Prime Minister.

With less than a year to go to the official date for leaving the EU, our government is locked in an argument that makes Swift’s satirical war between the Big Endians and the Little Endians over how to break an egg look positively sane. I will spare readers the stultifying details of the customs dispute, not least because I am not sure I understand them. Essentially, this is a political fight, a re-run of the referendum. The country may have voted to leave the EU; but since 48 per cent wanted to stay, that option has never really been killed off. Remainers who purport to be reconciled to Brexit and claim to be arguing only over the form it should take still think they can reverse it.

In the end, this decision will be taken by parliament, though you might be forgiven for thinking it had already done so when the Commons agreed to trigger Article 50 by a substantial majority last year. Not a bit of it. In the Lords on Monday, peers passed an amendment to the EU Withdrawal Bill setting out what should occur if MPS reject the final deal (assuming there is one) when it is put to the Commons in October.

In such circumstances, the Government would be told to go back and try again, which is clearly a preposterous idea since an agreement will already have been reached between governments and ratified by European legislatures. Brexiteers argue that in such circumstances we would leave with no deal. But the Commons will simply not allow that to happen because of the cliff-edge uncertainties it entails. Moreover, if the EU was asked to suspend the Article 50 process, is it really being suggested that they would deny the UK the option to stay?

No-deal brinkmanship might have been a credible strategy had Theresa May comprehensively won the snap general election, which seemed like a good idea at the time. When parliament was dissolved a year ago today, the Prime Minister set out confident of securing the big majority she needed to avoid precisely the political quicksands that are now threatening to engulf her government. We all know what happened.

So now what? There is a sense in Whitehall that the next two months are critical to the future of Brexit and the survival of the Government, starting with today’s Cabinet committee meeting.

The best-case scenario runs like this. Ministers agree on the technical option for avoiding a hard border in Ireland and go all-out to sell this to the party and the country as a practical and feasible solution. Towards the end of the month, the Commons will vote on an amendment to the Trade Bill to keep the UK in a customs union and the Government sees off a Tory rebellion and wins.

Mrs May then goes to the June summit in Brussels to persuade EU leaders to accept a compromise based around an off-the-peg EEA agreement which would enable the UK to continue trading goods and services freely. As non-eu EEA States are not in the Common Commercial Policy, the UK could enter into its own free trade arrangements outside the bloc. This is a sensible, least-worst solution that we should have adopted 18 months ago.

The doomsday alternative is that the Government gets into a fight in the Commons, loses the vote on the customs union or fails to reverse this week’s Lords amendment and Theresa May resigns. For this to happen there will have to be more than a dozen Tory MPS ready to countenance the prospect of Jeremy Corbyn in Downing Street. A few are said to be prepared to risk what they see as a short-term calamity for the long-term prize of reversing Brexit but it is not clear how many.

In truth, no one really knows what would transpire if the Government fell. There would presumably be an election, but what would it be about – leaving without an agreement or staying in the EU? What if it again resulted in no party winning an outright majority? A coalition could only be cobbled together with parties that take a similar view of Brexit; yet they may not represent a majority in the country.

The price of any pact might well be the promise of another referendum, though what would the question be? And if it ended up reversing the last one, how would that help unite the country? It would be an unmitigated political and constitutional mess.

Tory MPS thinking of helping to defeat the Government on what would effectively be a confidence issue need to consider that they may unleash demons far scarier than anything they have convinced themselves will be conjured up by our leaving the EU. They may well think that staying in the EU is in the long-term interests of the country – but we had that argument during the referendum.

By precipitating a crisis in the hope of reversing Brexit, they risk causing chaos and national humiliation. If we wanted some appropriate music to accompany that debacle, how about this from Les Miserables: “Do you hear the people sing? Singing the songs of angry men?”