When Conservative ministers who campaigned for Brexit confront the detail involved in removing the UK from the European Union, they tend either to soften their position or resign. David Davis tried both. The former Brexit secretary started out gung-ho, then flirted with compromise. But, realising in the end that his campaign rhetoric and ministerial duties were incompatible, he quit.

Mr Davis’s successor, Dominic Raab, is already experiencing the pain that comes with trying to accomplish in reality something that was conceived in fantasy. Questioned by a parliamentary committee this week, Mr Raab insisted that the prime minister’s Brexit blueprint – the Chequers plan – is a viable basis for negotiations in Brussels, despite many Tory colleagues openly despising the proposals.

One such is Boris Johnson, who showed no interest in Brexit detail as foreign secretary and now shows no intention of offering viable alternatives to Theresa May’s plan, while manoeuvring against her. Mr Johnson’s approach is unchanged since the referendum. It is to belittle every technical obstacle and present reckless, impossible options as if they were modest and easy.

Brexit cheerleaders have sanitised the likelihood of the UK leaving the EU on acrimonious, chaotic terms. The same people did not hint that such an outcome was possible two years ago. Some were plain ignorant, believing the process would be easy. Others knew that their revolutionary agenda required vast economic disruption and chose not to advertise that feature of it to voters.

Either way, June 2016’s result cannot reasonably be interpreted in 2018 as majority support for any one Brexit model, least of all one that the Treasury believes will make the country weaker and poorer. Philip Hammond this week conceded that a no-deal scenario would require a “refocusing of government priorities” – a euphemism for longer austerity as limited revenues are diverted to absorb the shock of severing EU links.

A minority of fanatical Brexiters has skewed political debate in this country to the point where the most dangerous ideas are treated by ministers as normal items on the menu of available options, while softer models that would limit the damage are dismissed out of hand. It is hardly surprising then that the campaign for a “People’s Vote” on the outcome of negotiations is gaining momentum. This week the GMB, one of the country’s largest trade unions, called for a public vote. Andy Burnham, the mayor of Greater Manchester, said a referendum would be necessary if the alternative were “crashing out”, although he qualified his remarks with a warning that such a vote could risk public unrest.

Mr Burnham’s ambivalence is not unusual. Many critics of Brexit dislike referendums on constitutional grounds – the UK is a parliamentary democracy, after all – and because they can be socially divisive. Those are justified qualms. They have to be set against the evidence that Brexit is a shambles and time is running out to avert disaster. That is why there must be some consideration given to a democratic avenue towards a no-Brexit model.

Some remainers have always agitated for that outcome. But others, in parliament and the country at large, accepted the referendum result in good faith. They sincerely wanted the government to find a non-destructive route out of the EU. No one in that camp relishes the prospect of another referendum. Those making the case for such a poll argue that the political cost of confronting a Brexit reversal is lower than that of driving into an abyss.

When ministers seriously consider no-deal outcomes that many Eurosceptics would recently have deemed extreme and unwise, it is perverse that there is so little discussion of a proposition recently supported by 48% of voters. The probability that Mrs May’s deal will be superior to the terms of Britain’s current EU relationship is almost certainly zero. Retaining that membership will inevitably start to look more attractive as long as the politicians who created this mess for the country look incapable of fixing it.