For the past two and a half years, James O’Brien, a popular London talk-radio host, has been arguing that the “Leave” vote in the 2016 Brexit referendum was a tragic mistake. On Thursday morning, as the British Prime Minister, Theresa May, was preparing to defend in Parliament the controversial withdrawal deal her government has made with the European Union, O’Brien’s show received a call from a Leave voter named Bill, who said he owed the host an apology. “I was wrong, I was wrong, I was wrong, I was wrong,” the man began to say, in an accent that placed him firmly outside the British élite. “I’m an old-fashioned git, really, I suppose . . . For some reason, I thought we were better off, but, clearly, I was wrong.” As Bill made this admission, his voice broke and he started crying. O’Brien pointed out that 17.4 million Britons made the same choice, and told him not to blame himself. Bill was inconsolable. “I was wrong, I am so sorry,” he blubbered. “What have I done to my country?”

At this stage, nobody knows for sure. As I write these words, there are rumors that the Parliamentary Conservative Party may hold a vote of confidence later on Friday, which could conceivably force the Prime Minister to step down. If May survives and also wins a subsequent vote on her withdrawal deal, Britain will officially leave the E.U. in March. If Parliament rejects the agreement, May could try to negotiate another one or resign. If she resigns, there will probably be a general election, although it is also possible that Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour Party leader, could form a minority government and try his hand at haggling with Brussels. (Although many in the Labour Party are anti-Brexit, Corbyn has pledged to honor the result of the 2016 referendum.) If no agreement can be reached, Britain could crash out of the E.U. without any exit deal, a prospect that horrifies business leaders and investors but is looked upon with equanimity by some ardent Brexiteers.

It’s an almighty mess, and, as O’Brien pointed out to his distressed caller, it isn’t entirely the making of the ordinary Britons who voted Leave. For decades now, right-wing politicians and their allies on Fleet Street have been vilifying the E.U. and portraying its officials as meddling bureaucrats. During the referendum campaign, the Brexiteers misled the populace about how easy it would be to extract Britain from the union. They also lied about the economic benefits of leaving, claiming, for example, that it would generate billions of pounds a year to spend on the National Health Service.

Underlying this misinformation campaign was decades of social conditioning that warped the British psyche—and particularly the English psyche—into thinking that Britain was a place apart from, and superior to, the Continent. Growing up in England during the nineteen-seventies, I must have watched dozens of movies about plucky Britain’s heroic defeat of Hitler and the Germans in the Second World War, a narrative that downplayed the role of others on the allied side, including the United States. The French we learned to regard as unreliable garlic-gobblers. Italians were the butt of jokes—“What is the shortest book in the world? The Italian book of war heroes”—as were Spaniards. (“He’s from Barcelona” was a punch line in a popular television comedy.) As for the rest of the Continent, who needed it? Not us, the nation of Bobby Charlton, Churchill, Shakespeare, and King Arthur.

Things are different today, especially among young and highly educated Britons. To them, the freedom of movement enshrined in the E.U. treaties is a potential life-changer—one that entitles them to live and work anywhere from the Atlantic to the Black Sea. To many Scots, membership of the E.U., along with looser ties to the U.K., offers a path to reasserting their national identity. British businesses, and foreign businesses with plants in the U.K., are also keenly aware of the advantages that membership of the E.U. affords them, including free movement of parts, final goods, labor, and capital. In a world of global supply chains and just-in-time manufacturing, the prospect of extensive customs checks being imposed between the U.K. and its neighbors was (and is) one that horrifies businesses.

But especially among older English people some of the jaundiced approach to Europe has survived, and it got amplified when hundreds of thousands of migrants from Eastern Europe moved to Britain in search of work after the expansion of the E.U. that took place in 2004. The doubters discovered a voice in the likes of Nigel Farage, Boris Johnson, and Jacob Rees-Mogg, who claimed Britain would be better off without the E.U. In their saner moments, the Brexiteers acknowledged the importance of maintaining ready access to the vast European market. But they insisted that, with some dexterous negotiating, Britain would be able to guarantee this outcome and still reclaim full sovereignty from Brussels. In the words of Johnson, it would be possible to have a cake and eat it, too.

Early on, Donald Tusk, the president of the European Council, warned that this was a fantasy. “Buy a cake, eat it, and see if it is still there on the plate,” he told the advocates of “cakeism.” Not without reason, Tusk and his colleagues feared that the real goal of the Brexiteers was to convert Britain into a deregulated, low-wage, low-tax competitor to the E.U. So the Europeans made it clear: if Britain wanted to retain full access to the E.U. market, it would have to continue to abide by the union’s standards on taxation, employment, competition, and the environment, as well as accepting some rulings from the European Court of Justice. (This is roughly the position held by Norway, which isn’t a member of the E.U. but engages in a great deal of commerce with the bloc.) Failure to accept these terms would relegate Britain to the status of Canada and other far-off trading partners.

After shilly-shallying for almost two years after the referendum, May finally accepted this reality. In July, during a meeting at her official country house, Chequers, she warned her Cabinet that Britain would have to make major concession to reach a withdrawal agreement. Such a deal, which was known in the lingo as a “soft Brexit,” would still be worthwhile, May argued, because it would allow Britain to restrict the flow of European migrants, as well as enable it to stop paying into the E.U. budget and opt out of some E.U. policies, such as the Common Agricultural Policy and the Common Fisheries Policy, which are widely regarded as being unfair to Britain.

The deal that British negotiators reached with the E.U. earlier this week is basically the one May outlined at Chequers. Even some pro-Europeans, including Tony Blair, the former Prime Minister, described it as a capitulation, but that wasn’t entirely fair: May had very little bargaining leverage. She and the Europeans both knew that, even as Britain went through the motions of leaving the E.U., it couldn’t afford to make a clean break. Which, of course, raises the question of what the point of the exercise was to begin with.

The harsh fact is there was no point. Contrary to the claims of the Brexiteers, Britain already had substantial flexibility within the E.U. Having long ago opted out of the common currency and other E.U. initiatives, it retained the freedom to set its own interest rates and fiscal policies, check visitors at the border, and reject some of the legislative directives from Brussels, but it enjoyed all the advantages of the single market. To the extent that any E.U. member country was having its cake and eating it, Britain was the one. Now it has spent two and a half years trying to sabotage its future. As Bill and others are discovering, this can be a painful truth to contemplate.

A previous version of this article misstated the parameters of a vote of confidence in Prime Minister Theresa May.