Theresa May has left London with her husband, Philip, for a walking holiday in Switzerland, a country that is not a member of the European Union, although it does allow the free movement of people—even British prime ministers. May has said that she enjoys the peace and quiet of the Alps, which she will certainly need before the Brexit phony war ends in September and her government faces the challenge of extricating the United Kingdom from the European Union—an operation that will likely be worse than amputation without anesthetic.

Right now, I can report no advance in the understanding of what Brexit actually means, or what the three ministers charged with overseeing the surgery—David Davis, Dr. Liam Fox, and the buffoonish Boris Johnson—are planning. What is becoming clear, however, is that the U.K. is much more entangled with the European Union than the Brexit campaigners ever admitted, or even understood, at the time of the referendum. And as with any amputation there is never a plus, only one very large minus.

The Brexit camp is keen on citing the example of Greenland, which voted to leave the E.U. in 1982, a few years after the country won home rule from Denmark. But even with a population of just 56,000 and an economy that is tiny in comparison to that of the United Kingdom, it took three straight years of negotiations for Greenland to realize its emancipation. If Article 50, the mechanism that formally triggers Britain’s exit, is invoked, the U.K. is somehow expected to complete the process in two years.

Should that article be triggered, however, the clock would tick. As as each day elapses, Britain’s bargaining position with the rest of Europe would become gradually worse. (You can imagine how much the French are going to enjoy that slow torture.) No wonder the man who negotiated the Greenland deal, Denmark’s former foreign minister Uffe Ellemann-Jensen, told Bloomberg, “Basically, the British need to take time to understand what an enormous task they took upon themselves. . . . Asking for a Brexit and expecting it to be clear-cut simply can’t happen.”

There is nothing to give us confidence that anyone in the U.K. government fully comprehends the reality of the situation. After all, the government minister in charge of Brexit, the aforementioned David Davis, only realized in the last few months that it would not be possible for the U.K. to forge individual trade deals with different E.U. member states. As an old debating partner of mine—we have shared many platforms on civil liberties—I hesitate to be too brutal about Davis’s failure to grasp that E.U. countries cannot make discrete trade deals. But, frankly, it beggars belief that he lived for so long under this illusion, and that these wildly optimistic fantasies weren’t challenged.

British Conservative politicians are habitually rather scathing about Scandinavian countries on account of their enlightened attitudes towards welfare and tax. But now they are all over Norway like a cheap suit, hoping that Britain can, like Norway, become a member of the European Free Trade Association, which allows a country to enjoy the benefits of the single market while not being a member of the European Union. Not unreasonably, Norway is raising objections. “It’s not certain that it would be a good idea to let a big country into this organization,” said the country’s European-affairs minister, Elizabeth Vik Aspaker. “It would shift the balance, which is not necessarily in Norway’s interests.”