I was awakened by the bedside radio coming to life, leaving me briefly lost between a bad dream and reality. Two BBC World Service reporters were calmly discussing a nation gone raving mad. Its food needed stockpiling. Medicines were running low. Ports were jammed and motorways were turning into vast lorry parks. Foreigners were fleeing, care homes emptying of staff, fruit lying unpicked. Where was it?

Then, through my slowly dawning consciousness, someone called Dominic Raab started talking about bacon, lettuce and tomato sandwiches and writing 75 “technical notices”. Meanwhile the prime minister was off to sell child pornography policing in Africa. What nightmare was this? Surely not 21st-century Britain?

They show hooligan exhilaration in punching a chunk of the economy in the face – with other people getting hurt

I later found that Raab’s ambition was to validate Theresa May’s Brexit thesis that “no deal is better than a bad deal” and to reassure the British public that their BLT would not be affected should the former emerge as the country’s fate. But if this was no deal, what could a worse deal possibly look like? After soft Brexit and hard Brexit, we now have mad Brexit, barking mad.

Following the Brexit referendum, there were two plausible options, soft and hard. Under the first, the UK would withdraw from the institutions of the European Union but remain a member of its customs union, with most features of its wider single market. This would honour the desire of importers, exporters and the Irish for a “frictionless” border with Britain’s chief trading partner, the EU.

This concept of an “outer ring” envisaged Britain joining Norway under the old European Free Trade Association (Efta) regime it enjoyed before joining the common market in 1973. It would leave the EU but would stay within the European Economic Area, keeping control over matters such as farming and fishing policy. Norway has no “vote”, but lobbies strongly when the EU affects it. For the UK, the steady progress towards a collective market in goods, services and labour – initiated and championed by Margaret Thatcher in 1986 – would remain in place.

When I almost (but not quite) voted for Brexit in 2016, I assumed it would be something like this. I never dreamed a British cabinet would go for “hard”. There was not a shred of evidence that the hard option was what Britons wanted. They did not want imports and exports impeded at borders, food prices rising, or their holidays ended with a “hostile environment” at ports of entry. Their concern lay in controlling immigration. Even then, polls showed that few wanted to see care workers, plumbers, builders or hospital staff driven back to Poland. The priority always was immigration from non-EU countries, a concern shared by all EU countries. If only May’s negotiators had accepted the customs union and stuck to discussing migration, they might have found common ground and a deal already.

Somewhere at the messy end of customs union is, I am sure, where Brexit is going to culminate. It is towards this goal that rumours of compromise between May and France’s President Macron seem aimed. Negotiations are likely to default to the “backstop position” of a customs union, as advocated for Northern Ireland by the EU’s Michel Barnier and now called “Chequers minus”. It makes pragmatic sense.

Advocates of hard Brexit, such as Jacob Rees-Mogg and Boris Johnson, are deep into reality denial. They drink the Kool-Aid of Daily Mail confirmation bias. Nothing I have heard or read since 2016 explains how hard Brexit is remotely in Britain’s interest. Special status – heads we win, tails you lose – was never going to wash with the EU. Hard Brexit would therefore mean shifting to World Trade Organisation tariffs, a customs wall and detailed border inspection. The UK would have to find a surge in trade with the rest of the world that made up for lost EU business. This was glaringly, idiotically implausible.

Q&A What is a customs union? Show A customs union means that countries agree to apply no or very low tariffs to goods sold between them, and to collectively apply the same tariffs to imported goods from the rest of the world. International trade deals are then negotiated by the bloc as a whole. For the EU, this means deals are negotiated by by Brussels, although individual member state governments agree the mandate and approve the final deal. The EU has trade deals covering 69 countries, including Canada and South Korea, which the UK has been attempting to roll over into post-Brexit bilateral agreements. Proponents of an independent UK trade policy outside the EU customs union say Britain must forge its own deals if it is to take advantage of the world’s fastest-growing economies. However they have never explained why Germany manages to export more than three times the value in goods to China than Britain does, while also being in the EU customs union. Jennifer Rankin

Yet desperate not to seem anti-immigrant (and Johnson instinctively is not), the hard Brexit lobby was forced back on to trade as the be all and end all of their cause. The cry of “we must make our own deals” never had specifics attached. It is meaningless as long as the UK trades half its food with Europe, and needs to integrate its car and aero industries with the continent. Besides, other EU nations do deals with Africa and China, as does the EU with Egypt, Turkey and Morocco. All trade is a barter of sovereignty. “Taking back control” of trade is waffle.

Experts warned from the start that hard Brexit would take years to deliver. There would be a chaos of dismantling regulatory harmonisation, a hard border in Northern Ireland and long delays at ports of entry. That is why mad Brexit – “crashing out” – has risen so fast up the political agenda. Hard Brexiters have been forced to admit: “Let’s just do it and see what happens.” They show a touch of hooligan exhilaration in punching a chunk of the economy in the face – with other people’s livelihoods getting hurt.

As the forces of soft Brexit prepare for the end game, mad Brexit is what cabinet Brexiters are seeking to sanitise, at a staggering cost of a reported £3bn in administration alone. Raab is implying that all will be well with no deal, so long as private businesses tool up to carry the bureaucratic burden. Like Rees-Mogg, he believes they should bear the short-term cost as it is supposedly to the nation’s long-term advantage. It’s a dystopian, Blade Runner Brexit.

There was a case for Brexit to traumatise the politics of a hesitant and ill-led European community. There was no case to destroy the vitality of a common market that had served Britain well for decades. There is no other Brexit but soft. May must seize control of her party and lead it in that direction.

• Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist