These tropes abide today — but they have ceased acting merely as a shelter, for those who live surrounded by them, against politics. They have now become an active, transformative political force. It’s not just The Daily Mail cartoon, or Mrs. May’s crypto-imperialist rhetoric. It’s the U.K. Independence Party leader Paul Nuttall, striding about in a tweed jacket and matching hat like a Victorian country squire. It’s the Brexit secretary David Davis, responding to complaints from the Civil Service that it lacks the budget to deal with the logistics of leaving the European Union by invoking the Blitz spirit of World War II. It’s the foreign secretary Boris Johnson saying that France’s president, François Hollande, “wants to administer punishment beatings to anyone who chooses to escape, rather in the manner of some World War II movie.” Those most under the spell of imperial nostalgia have now become the sorcerers themselves, having somehow managed to conjure up a mandate to transform Britain in their image.

But no matter how confident the Brexiteers might be, their grip on reality remains patchy at best. Global Britain’s delusions are unlikely to withstand the shock of actually leaving the European Union. One indication of this came shortly after the referendum result, when it emerged that Marmite, an iconic British food, was actually owned by a Dutch company, Unilever. Its prices are set to go up after Britain leaves the European Union. Andrea Leadsom, the minister for the environment, food and rural affairs, has indicated that Britain’s post-Brexit trade strategy will be primarily based around the export of jam, biscuits and cheese. Britain, it seems, is in danger of becoming the world’s largest church fete.

Still, Mrs. May will probably be able to carry the public with her. Her Brexit plans have generally polled well, and since taking office she has remained by far the most popular of all the major party leaders. Even if there is an economic collapse when Britain leaves the European Union — as most analysts think is likely — her mandate probably won’t be hurt: Already the right-wing press is lining up to lay the blame for the coming crisis on the bad attitude of “Remoaners,” as it has labeled the “liberal elitists” who remain pro-Europe even after the referendum result.

So what’s going to happen? These days, it feels like the worst-case scenario always prevails. If that happens this time, too, Brexit will mean that England, shorn of Scotland, Northern Ireland and maybe even Wales, contracts into a small, isolated, one-party state governed by schoolteacherly Conservatives who persist in wild-eyed delusions about their country’s special grandeur. In this desperate fantasy Britain, there are no jobs, and any dissent — from disseminating pro-foreigner propaganda to having a nonregulation haircut — will be punished by forced participation in the government’s “Clean for the Queen” program (which incidentally is a real initiative that was pioneered last year to encourage Her Majesty’s subjects to de-litter their neighborhoods in preparation for her birthday).

All of this might sound bizarre, over-the-top, even actively demented. But if what the Brexiteers want is to return Britain to a utopia they have devised by splicing a few rose-tinted memories of the 1950s together with an understanding of imperial history derived largely from images on vintage biscuit tins, then all of this seems chillingly plausible, insofar as it would, in many ways, constitute the realization of that dream. Viva Britannia!