Cowardice is a progressive disease. Leave it untreated and it can kill. Everyone should know by now that the big lie of Brexit was not that it would deliver £350m a week to the NHS – although that was as brazen a political lie as Suez – but that Brexit would be easy. Everyone should know but not everyone does. Political cowards will not force the public to confront the unpalatable truth.

That the electorate was deceived is certain. “The day after we vote we hold all the cards and we can choose the path we want,” declared Michael Gove in April last year . The voters should not worry their silly little heads because “there will continue to be free trade and access to the single market”, Boris Johnson continued. Brexit will free us, added David Davis. “Be under no doubt, we can do deals with our trading partners and we can do them quickly.”

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Instead of the promised utopia, we are in our weakest negotiating position since Munich. Far from skipping away down whatever path we want, we are doomed to trudge into a mire. Craig Oliver, David Cameron’s spin doctor, said that Brexit represented the defeat of “complex truth in the face of simple lies”. Britain is about to be taught that the trouble with complex truths is that you cannot deny them forever.

But who will do the teaching? Despite its recent shift in policy, Labour has displayed a cowardly unwillingness to hold the Tories to account by throwing the false bill of goods Leave campaigners offered back in their faces. But however deplorable Labour’s timidity has been, the cowardice that matters is Theresa May’s.

She made the horrendous mistake of endorsing every false promise the Leave campaign made when she took power. She might have said she would respect the referendum result but had to warn the public that leaving the EU would be hard and that there would have to be compromises if Britain was to avoid needless suffering. Instead, she made the propaganda of Farage, Johnson and Gove her own. Our hapless diplomats were instructed to work on the assumption that there would be little cost in leaving the EU – no restrictions on access to the single market or customs checks at the border – because it was in the EU’s interests to let us have our cake and eat it.

It is easy to see why she had to block out the thought that the EU’s prime interest was, funnily enough, the protection of the EU. The right destroyed the previous two Tory prime ministers. Unless May, a Remain supporter, bent the knee, she would meet their fate. In terms of party management, her servility has been a success. Rightwing MPs and the Mail and the Telegraph still cheer her on, despite her catastrophic election campaign.

The price of their support has been to split Britain down the middle. Whatever side you cleave to, can we at least agree that, as the pound sinks towards parity with the euro and real wages fall, our country is in a perilous position? With effectively a year left to complete the article 50 negotiations there is no progress worth mentioning. If nothing changes, we will either crash out of the EU with no plan for the future or be forced to admit that Brussels can do as it pleases. This isn’t an argument between Remainers and Leavers but between realists and fantasists.

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May joined the fantasists the moment she entered Downing Street and I wonder if she can ever break free. By pandering to the right, she has increased the power of the right and made the only story that millions hear the story that the right wants to tell.

Step away from the liberal world for a moment and walk in the shoes of Leave supporters. They won a democratic vote and cannot see why we cannot just impose immigration controls and cut all links without paying a penny.

No one in the government has hammered home the uncomfortable truth that clearly we will have to pay a divorce bill if we want to extract concessions from the EU on trade and jobs. Clearly, too, the EU will try to push it as high as it can. Instead, May has struck fantastical poses: that the European court of justice can have no say in British life, for instance, even though dozens of legal and trade agreements have it as the court of final appeal.

All these evasions fade into the background when the star of the show takes the stage. The government proposes that we leave in 2019 but have a “bespoke transitional arrangement” in place to keep us close to the single market and customs union. You can agonise, as I have, about what on earth this means. Enlightenment comes when you realise that the government does not know what on earth it means. Even if the deadlock could be broken in the remaining year, and bespoke arrangements fitted up overnight like a suit at a cheap tailors, the EU would surely demand money and acceptance of European court verdicts in return. Labour’s position of staying in the single market until all negotiations end has the merit of being practical and David Davis is hinting that in end the Tories may be forced to imitate it. How, then, will this deceitful government explain to all those who have had enough of mass migration that freedom of movement must continue for a while yet?

The failure to confront the central Leave lie that “we hold all the cards” is having huge consequences. A government unable to tell the truth about tough choices ahead is in no position to handle the toughest negotiations since 1945. It is also wide open to a rightwing backlash. It has been clear to me since the referendum that a Farage or Johnson could launch a new nationalist movement by telling bemused and angry Leave voters that the ruin Brexit brings is not the fault of rightwing politicians – good heavens, no – but the result of “the elite” betraying 17 million Leave voters and “stabbing Britain in the back”.

But perhaps I do not need to conjure up an imaginary extremist backlash. Perhaps the extremists are already in power and running the country. Theresa May has not learned the lesson all politicians should have learned by 2017, that unless you take on the extremists, the extremists will take you over. And if she wants to know who the extremist she must take on is, she need only look in the mirror.