A second referendum is the only way forward

We are left with an obvious choice – Leave with no deal or Remain – and our MPS are incapable of making it

And so we begin again, with at least another six months of interminable nonsense and economically debilitating uncertainty to go. The Government, hemmed in by an intransigent European Union and a deeply divided Parliament, has proved incapable of delivering the Brexit people voted for, and must therefore think anew about what it is trying to do and how to achieve it.

We plainly cannot carry on like this; everyone is at the end of their tether. A second referendum, it is increasingly clear, may be the only way of achieving the closure we need.

As a half-hearted Remainer who favoured staying purely on pragmatic grounds, rather than because of any great love for the EU, it wasn’t initially difficult for me to accept the referendum result, and to reject the idea, proposed with indecent haste by Remain fanatics, of a second vote.

This, I believed, would be a deeply divisive and politically destabilising

step, hinted at by Nigel Farage when he said that if Brexit wasn’t delivered…“then I will be forced to don khaki and pick up a rifle”. Once a country has decided to do something, it must go through with it and for better or worse make of it what it can; there seemed no other choice.

Yet politically, Brexit has not gone well, consuming the Government, paralysing the economy and making Britain into an international joke. Many blame this failure on Theresa May’s manifest unsuitability for the job, but I doubt anyone else would have done notably better.

The public’s instruction is proving impossible to deliver, not primarily because of incompetence on May’s part, but because the referendum as framed was misconceived in the first place. We were not voting on a plan to leave, but on the mere idea of it. As always seemed likely, the practicalities are proving much more difficult than the theory.

If the politicians cannot agree, then the public must again decide instead. The mechanism for this would normally be a general election, but it is by no means guaranteed that this would break the deadlock. Another hung parliament is the more likely outcome.

That a new Tory leader would significantly shift the dial is also far from obvious. Grudgingly, I have therefore come around to the idea of a second referendum.

What would the question be? This too has become clearer over the past couple of months. We can quickly dispense with the idea of multiple choices, transferable votes, and two stage plebiscites. And no, it would not be between Mrs May’s deal and no deal, or between Mrs May’s deal and Remain. Her deal has been thrice rejected, and quite plainly commands little support among voters.

Rather, it must be a simple binary choice between the only two realistic options left – departure on no-deal terms or calling the whole thing off. Mrs May has tried her hardest to find a middle road, but has discovered that beyond some kind of ill-defined rocky path into the wilderness, there is none. Negotiators were asked to deliver the undeliverable, and unsurprisingly, they failed.

Yanis Varoufakis, Greece’s former finance minister, got it right; you cannot negotiate with the EU. The only way of dealing with its legal zealots is to tell them what you are going to do, and then do it.

All middle courses, it has transpired, defeat much of the purpose of leaving the EU, rendering the UK to a greater or lesser extent a rule-taker from a supranational organisation it is powerless to influence. This is vassalage, and is manifestly worse than the position we already have. In any case, it is a very high price to pay for more robust immigration controls. It is also completely unacceptable for an advanced economy as large as our own, as well as almost certainly unsustainable.

Many Brexiteers will balk at the idea of a second vote. They won once, why should they have to win the argument all over again? What is more, winning a referendum where the choice is defined as Remain or Leave without a deal would plainly be a much bigger ask than the fantasy cake-and-eat-it Brexit proffered in the last campaign.

Brexit purists might reasonably think the chances of a no-deal Brexit would be better secured through a new leader and a general election. In the end, however, any such course has to be sold to the country.

There is presumably some kind of a convincing economic case for no-deal, beyond that of mere assertion. So let us hear it. And if not, then at least people will know what they are letting themselves in for.

To sneak a no-deal Brexit through by default or subterfuge is only to invite an almighty backlash if in the event the sunlit uplands prove illusory.

In a war, one side eventually has to triumph over the other in order to resolve the conflict. Uneasy truce rarely brings lasting peace. As things stand, there is no sense of that point of surrender, making settlement by sudden death, penalty shoot-out the only logical way forward.