IT is some sort of achievement, I suppose, to have got to the point where most of us would happily never hear the word “Brexit” again, not only before it’s happened, but before there is even any consensus on what it means. But then, as we could have told the rest of the UK, any referendum will settle matters only if your side wins, and it turns out that it doesn’t do that either.

Well, sometimes it does. You don’t hear much from the supporters of the Alternative Vote system these days, perhaps because there weren’t any. But any vote that doesn’t result in a landslide – and in that case, why bother with the vote? – is bound to be divisive.

Brexit has been outstanding in that department. It’s divided not just the winners and losers, but the Remainers and the Leavers amongst themselves. Lots of us have even begun to disagree with the people we agree with, having discovered that they voted the correct way (that is, as we did) for the wrong reasons.

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As is the case surprisingly often, everyone is wrong. Consequently, everyone from Jacob Rees-Mogg to Lord Adonis seems hell-bent on sabotaging the outcome. It’s as if no one bothered to read the question, which was: “Should the United Kingdom remain a member of the European Union or leave the European Union?”

You’ll notice that it’s not whether we should leave the customs union, leave the single market, end free movement, introduce a hard border between Northern Ireland and the Republic, maintain passporting for the City of London, introduce protectionist measures for British companies, farmers, fishermen, trades unionists, students or any other group you can think of, deport immigrants, set up additional tariffs, abandon all tariffs, totally comply with or totally abandon EU regulations, spend £350 million a week on the NHS, encourage the House of Lords to block Commons votes, or have another go at a referendum on Scottish independence.

Yet almost everyone is behaving as if at least some of those things are the crucial component of Brexit. It doesn’t help that all the parties – I offer a partial exemption to the Liberal Democrats – are not only internally divided, but have utterly inconsistent stances.

Michael Gove: Brexit has led to Britain having one of 'warmest' attitudes in EU towards migration

The Prime Minister, having campaigned for Remain, unilaterally adopted a stance that ignored many of the things the official Leave campaign concentrated on, focusing instead on the anti-immigration line peddled by Nigel Farage. Whether this was because the Home Office had given her a bee in her bonnet about immigration, or because she was determined to sideline the liberal free trade case made by rivals such as Michael Gove and Boris Johnson, it seems frankly incompetent to have triggered Article 50 without investigating an arrangement similar to the Norwegian or Swiss models, or debating whether, for example, the UK might join Efta.

Jeremy Corbyn – who also campaigned, though not terribly enthusiastically, for Remain – seems, frankly, not to understand what either the single market or the customs union are, and to have found in Brexit an excuse to increase, rather than remove, tariffs, regulation and red tape. The chief advantage of leaving seems, in his view, to be ditching the EU’s inconvenient “neoliberal” rules against protectionism and monopolies, and those that encourage competition.

Nicola Sturgeon, predictably, saw the divergence between Scotland’s vote and that of the UK as a whole as an argument for independence, though the logic of leaving one union in order to stay in another one (though it would, inconveniently, actually involve leaving both of them) rather escapes me.

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The position of the Europhile Liberal Democrats is at least more consistent, though it means ignoring the result of the biggest popular vote ever conducted in the UK, which might be thought not especially liberal or democratic. And they, like most of the diehard Remain faction, also now have to say the opposite of what they said before the vote, when we were told that there would be no second chances and that fiscal Armageddon would instantly follow a Leave result.

On which point: are there any more plaintive words than “despite Brexit” for the Remain camp? Yes, the pound at first fell badly (though the IMF had been warning it was overvalued for years), but has now recovered completely, putting on five per cent against the dollar this year.

Unemployment is the lowest since 1975 and employment the highest ever. There has been no mass exodus of foreign firms; indeed, tech investment is up 115 per cent since the vote, more than France and Germany combined. Applications from foreign students have gone up 11 per cent, manufacturing is at its second-highest ever level, productivity at the highest level for a decade, UK food and drink exports are up more than 10 per cent and there are, well, more EU workers than there were before the referendum. At the end of last year, Forbes listed the UK as the best country in the world in which to do business, the first time we’d been top.

Naturally, those who predicted meltdown now say: “Ah yes, but Brexit hasn’t happened yet.” Which is true, but doesn’t explain why, when they were so staggeringly wrong about the immediate effects, they should now have become infallibly prescient.

This is the Venezuela model of prediction. You’ll remember that a couple of years ago it was evidence of how well socialism worked, until, like every other socialist economy ever, it became a hyperinflationary hellhole with a starving population, and then it became clear that it hadn’t been properly socialist after all.

Those who claim that leaving the EU will do much the same to the UK have already been proved wrong. But there are still plenty of difficulties, and the pretence by hardline Brexiters that they have a mandate for a particular position (as long as it’s ultramontane) is as dangerous as the Remain camp’s attempt simply to ignore the public mandate.

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Any model, from the “nuclear option” of WTO rules to an EU-lite arrangement such as Efta, could work, though some are more attractive than others. Despite the negotiating talk of “no cherry-picking”, the EU already has numerous cherry-picked and tailored arrangements, both internally and with other countries. But no faction is going to get everything it wants, because that was never what was on offer. There was a binary choice, and the decision was made.

The job now is to make the best of it.