When does uncertainty become the worst condition of all? This fall, more than three years after Britain voted to leave the European Union, no one was sure what form Brexit would take, what kind of relationship we would have with our nearest neighbors, or whether the whole thing could still be called off. Theresa May, the first Conservative Prime Minister with the job of taking the United Kingdom out of the E.U., had been forced to step down at the end of July. The second, Boris Johnson, did not seem trustworthy. There was a departure time—11 P.M. on October 31st—which the government tried very hard to convince people was real. On September 1st, it launched a hundred-million-pound public-information campaign called “Get Ready for Brexit.” TV spots showed sparkling European vacation destinations and advised viewers to check their travel insurance. There was a six-second video on Snapchat. Signs flashed on highways in the rain, telling truck drivers, “Freight to EU, Papers May Change.”

But everyone knew that Brexit was unlikely to happen by Halloween. May had spent two years negotiating an exit deal with the other twenty-seven members of the E.U., only to fail to get it approved by Parliament. Johnson, a flamboyant Brexiteer, wanted to rip up May’s agreement, but there didn’t seem to be time to start over. He insisted that Britain would leave, regardless of how talks went with Brussels. “No ifs or buts,” Johnson said, outside No. 10 Downing Street. The gulf between what the government said was going to happen and what seemed possible, let alone sensible, grew wider by the day. You could scroll through an article on your phone, full of the reasons that Brexit would not occur on October 31st, and be interrupted by an ad from the government telling you to get ready.

The ructions in Westminster took on historic proportions. Johnson lost his first seven votes as Prime Minister. In one, rebel Conservative Members of Parliament joined the opposition to pass a law aimed at preventing Johnson from taking Britain out of the E.U. without a deal. Johnson asked the Queen to shut down Parliament; the Supreme Court opened it up again. He called for a general election; the Labour Party, led by Jeremy Corbyn, refused to agree to one unless Brexit was delayed. The pound fell. Death threats multiplied. Politicians quoted poetry. A third of British adults said that Brexit had affected their mental health. A man in a clown outfit stood outside the gates of Parliament shouting, “Save our bendy bananas!”

Within weeks of the Brexit deadline, three very different outcomes were still possible. Johnson could somehow defy the odds and replace May’s deal with a more extreme form of Brexit, and get it approved by Parliament. He could seek to disobey the law and take Britain out of the E.U. without a deal. Or he would have to ask for an extension and hold an election, and the whole sorry story would continue. Newspapers published very complicated graphics, indicating all the branching futures. Foreigners marvelled at the mess. One European ambassador described the situation to me as an “intoxicating self-blockade.”

Elements of the Brexit crisis have been there since the beginning. The referendum on Britain’s membership in the European Union was a momentous act of direct democracy in a country that has been governed by Parliament for more than three hundred years. Seventy-four per cent of M.P.s, along with the Bank of England, the Confederation of British Industry, David Beckham, Stephen Hawking, and J. K. Rowling—“the establishment,” “the machine,” in the words of Leavers—opposed Brexit. The referendum did not specify what Brexit would look like. The constitution stretched and strained. The government struggled to cope. May’s attempts to contain the opposing forces in the country—the political imperative to leave and the frightening economic consequences of doing so—did not work. She ended up losing her majority in Parliament and crafting a compromise with the E.U., which satisfied nobody.

Since taking office, Johnson has sought to channel the nationalist impulses that brought about the Brexit vote. Unlike May, who quietly campaigned for Remain, Johnson headlined pro-Brexit rallies and spoke of looking forward to Britain’s “Independence Day.” He talks winningly about the country’s future outside the deadening regulations and pooled sovereignty of the E.U. “The people who bet against Britain are going to lose their shirts,” he has said.

But Johnson’s political career has been marked by lies and evasions. “He is genuinely a bad person. Not an unlikable person but a bad person, as in he has no morals, no principles and beliefs,” a former close colleague told me. “He would be whatever Prime Minister was necessary to maximize the chances of gaining and then maintaining power.” Between 2008 and 2016, Johnson was a liberal mayor of London. During his campaign, earlier this year, to become the leader of the Conservative Party, he veered between promises to leave the E.U. on October 31st, “do or die,” and strange, chummy disquisitions on his hobby of making model buses and painting the passengers inside.

It is hard to know how much he makes up as he goes along. Two days before Johnson took office, he hired as his senior adviser Dominic Cummings, the former campaign director of Vote Leave, the main pro-Brexit organization in 2016. Cummings had almost total control over the messaging of Vote Leave, which became notorious for its brazenness and its success with digital targeting. “Dom is obsessed with propaganda,” a former Vote Leave staffer told me. “He will build an army that is programmed to think like him.”

This fall, Johnson’s high-risk approach to Brexit has been defined by martial imagery and language that summons memories of the Second World War. He said that attempts to block his plans amounted to “collaboration” with Brussels. He described the law passed by Parliament to stop Britain from leaving the E.U. without a deal as the “Surrender Bill,” and expelled twenty-one Conservative M.P.s who voted for it from the Party. On September 5th, Johnson answered questions about Brexit in front of an unsettling backdrop of black-uniformed police officers. When asked whether he would, if necessary, request an extension to the Brexit talks, he replied, “I’d rather be dead in a ditch.”

“If it doesn’t make me scream, I get rid of it.” Facebook

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Shopping Cartoon by Kendra Allenby

The government amplified its preparations for a no-deal Brexit, collectively known as Operation Yellowhammer. Opposition M.P.s forced the release of an internal report warning of interruptions to the supply of fresh food, fuel, and medicine, as well as potential job losses, nursing-home closures, and clashes between fishing boats at sea. “Protests and counter-protests will take place across the UK,” the report cautioned. The poor would suffer the most. The “Get Ready for Brexit” ads rolled on. “I’ve never experienced politics like it,” Dominic Grieve, one of the purged Conservative M.P.s, told me. “It’s a complete departure from U.K. norms, and I’m afraid it will leave a trail of damage.”

The fury infected all sides. “We are now irreconcilably split for a generation,” Roland Rudd, the chairman of the People’s Vote campaign, which advocates for a new referendum, told me. “I don’t pretend that reversing this madness is going to bring us together. Honestly, it won’t.”

Until Johnson came to power, it had been possible to believe that there was a middle way on Brexit, or to be in denial that a decisive moment would ever come. That was no longer the case. A year before the referendum, Cummings wrote a blog post outlining what the Leave campaign might look like. He quoted Otto von Bismarck: “If revolution there is to be, better to undertake it than undergo it.”