ZOE WILLIAMS
What starts if Brexit stops?
A full two years after the referendum, in late June, Theresa May was still sounding like a baffling professor of formal logic, having advanced the conversation on from “Brexit means Brexit” to “Brexit means Brexit does mean Brexit.” She still had nothing concrete to say about what leaving the EU would involve. Then, at the start of July, she finally moved beyond gnomic utterance, convening her cabinet in Chequers to settle the real choices—a single market in goods, but not services or labour, “taking account of” European Court of Justice rulings and so on. It was all fantasy, in the sense that there was no reason to believe the EU would buy it, but for today’s Conservative Party it proved too much even to get specific in the realm of fiction, and her cabinet started to crumble.