“Oomph,” Prime Minister Boris Johnson said, earlier this week, is what he plans to bring to negotiations with the European Union as the deadline for Brexit approaches. But, given the state of play, that term is less likely to evoke the decisive force of Johnson’s diplomacy than the sound an overstuffed sack of flour makes when it’s dropped from a great height and bursts. As things stand, the United Kingdom is due to crash out of the European Union without essential rules in place—on trade, travel, data sharing, and, crucially, the rights of millions of European citizens living in the U.K., and vice versa—on October 31st. These areas and more were covered in a withdrawal agreement that Johnson’s predecessor, Theresa May, negotiated with the E.U., but Parliament rejected that deal three times. Almost everything Johnson has done this week has made a potential no-deal Brexit more likely and more damaging. On Wednesday, at a joint press conference with Johnson in Berlin, Angela Merkel—“Chancellor Angela,” as he called her—effectively told him that he had thirty days to stop being ridiculous. It won’t be enough time.

This round of trouble was set off on Monday, when Johnson sent a letter to Donald Tusk, the president of the European Council, insisting that everything would work out if the E.U. simply agreed to ditch one of the central components of the withdrawal agreement, known as the backstop, which relates to the Irish border. This is a long-standing issue, and Johnson’s airy declaration that the backstop was unfair, undemocratic, and simply had to go, with unspecified “alternative arrangements” to be figured out at some point, was seen in Europe not only as impractical but infuriating. (France’s President Emmanuel Macron, who met with Johnson in Paris on Thursday, called the backstop “indispensable.”) It didn’t help that, the same day, Johnson’s government made a garbled announcement about the end of the free movement of people in the event of a no-deal Brexit, which raised more questions for E.U. citizens in the U.K. than it answered. In both cases, the message was to trust Boris: he’d figure it out, or muddle through, or at least be the amusing author of a disaster.

The backstop problem, in short, is that the U.K.’s future land border with the European Union would run through the island of Ireland, separating the Republic of Ireland, which is part of the E.U., from the counties of Northern Ireland, which are part of the U.K. Brexiteers say that they want a real border with the E.U., with limits on free movement and a different regulatory and tariff system. They also say that they want to respect the 1998 Good Friday peace agreement, which has relied on an effectively open border on the island. And they don’t want there to be any delineation that makes Northern Ireland less a part of the U.K. (Here is a longer explanation, with a map.) The backstop would keep all of the U.K. in a customs union with the E.U. until the Irish border issue was solved. That task, as Merkel, a model of understatement, said at the press conference, “is, at first glance, not so simple.” Given the uncompromising, contradictory formula the Brexiteers insist on, it is impossible.

But Johnson and his Brexit cohort have protested that it is possible—even easy—to have it all. This is the fundamental dishonesty at the heart of Brexit. Johnson, when pressed, invokes the power of science; in Paris, he said that high-tech tools were “readily available,” though he was vague about what they were or where they might be acquired. (They don’t actually seem to exist; the search has been on for some time.) Merkel, in their press conference, was calling Johnson on that claim: if it would be no big deal to come up with the solution in two years, as he said, then “we can also find a solution in the next thirty days—why not?” The point was that it needed to happen before the October 31st deadline, rather than being pushed into the indefinite future. Johnson, in response, said, “you’ve set a very blistering timetable there.” (It has, of course, been a blistering three years since the referendum that put Brexit in motion.) Macron seconded Merkel, saying that if there was a solution “we should find it in the coming month.” Johnson claimed to find this all invigorating.

But what Johnson displayed this week was a double-sided disingenuousness. The problem is not just keeping the Irish border so open as to be frictionless after Brexit, which Johnson piously promised to do. (At the press conference with Merkel, he said that his government would “under no circumstances implement checks—customs checks or any other types of checks—at the border in Northern Ireland.”) It is keeping the border frictionless while recognizing and respecting Ireland’s status as a member of the European Union. Johnson is well aware of that consideration, even if he and other Brexiteers tend to brush it aside. (One suspects, sadly, that a few of them have a problem with any sentence in which the object of the verb “respect” is Irish.) How is that status supposed to be maintained if Ireland’s border with the U.K. becomes an unmanaged gap in the E.U.’s external border? As Macron put it, there is a double objective: “stability in Ireland and integrity of the single market.” Ireland’s standing could be compromised if it comes to be seen as a conduit for a post-Brexit U.K. to ply goods in E.U. markets that do not meet E.U. standards or evade its tariffs—which might be a plus in Johnson’s book—or if Ireland is forced to harden its border with the rest of the E.U. to preserve the dreams of the Brexiteers.

Many Brexiteers do seem to believe that the Irish will carry the load for them; the view is that the Republic has more to lose than anyone else in Europe if there is a no-deal Brexit, and so will persuade the rest of the E.U. to yield to even the wildest Johnsonian demands. (Others claim to be ready and eager for no-deal.) But, by the same measure, the Irish have more to lose than anyone from a bad deal that sells out their European future. And the idea, common among Brexiteers, that Ireland is economically dependent on the U.K.—that it would be lost without the British—is less and less true. As David McWilliams noted, in an opinion piece in the Financial Times, “In 1953, when Winston Churchill was prime minister for the last time, 91 per cent of Irish exports went to the UK. Today, that figure is 11 per cent and falling.” Churchill is Boris Johnson’s idol; Churchill had oomph. And now so does Ireland. What do the Brexiteers have left? Just a no-deal flop.