There's analogy that's useful for explaining the EU referendum result: say nine of your friends have gone to stay at a house in the countryside, and there’s a disagreement about what to do for dinner. Four of the friends are keen to stay in, but the rest want to go out. The group of five jump into a car and drive to the nearest town, but a problem emerges.

One of the couples who preferred to go out are vegans. The other three fancied a roast. There are two restaurants in the town: one’s a vegan café, the other a pub with real ales and a hog roast. The group is left arguing in the square that if you’d stayed home, everyone could’ve tried to reach a compromise, each cooking a bit of your own thing. Now, whatever restaurant you end up in, the majority of the group will be unhappy. Is it too late to drive back to the house?

This is what Brexit is like: "going out" had slightly more support, but when faced with the available options, by far the largest group of popular support is for staying in.

Brexit was like abstract art: you could stare at it and see whatever you wanted to see. From one angle it was about pulling up the drawbridge, saying "enough is enough" and that the country’s migration problem was at “breaking point.” From a different angle, Brexit was about making Britain global, unshackling her from the red tape of Brussels. Brexit was about staying in the single market or leaving the single market, retaining the benefits of the customs union or ditching them. Brexit was a reaction to globalisation, or the embrace of it. Over a year since the vote, we are finally starting to get the debate the country deserved over such a monumental decision, and the granular reality becomes more divisive by the day.

As the brushstrokes of detail continue, the once-blank canvas starts to be filled with a picture that some Leavers like, but that others despise. Brexit is no longer all things to all people, no longer the option into which lofty hopes and ambitions can be poured without fear of contradiction. “Out” is one thing, but when you’re faced with the available options, you realise that maybe none of these are what you voted for.

It is obvious to anyone paying attention that the Brexiters are already irredeemably split on the implementation of their project. Take our decision to leave Euratom, a move that may risk the treatment given to cancer patients and severely harm the UK’s nuclear industry. We’ve known that Theresa May wanted to leave Euratom since she mentioned it in the letter to the EU triggering article 50, but in recent days we’ve finally woken up to what this might mean. Leave architect Dominic Cummings was the man who admitted to exaggerating the £350 million claim, and he is furious with the decision to leave the atomic body, describing those in favour of it as “morons.” Within the same stream of tweets he said something even more revealing: that a “small core of MPs” who are campaigning for this hard Brexit would have achieved less than 15 per cent support in the referendum if they’d led the Leave campaign.

Let’s be generous to Cummings, and assume that the ultra-Brexiters who want to see the UK leave Euratom and avoid all oversight from the European Court of Justice would only have won 7 per cent of the vote. This ultra approach which will hobble cancer treatment, and throw the nuclear industry into chaos is antithetical to Cummings’ view of Brexit, and that of many others who championed our departure. Nigel Farage and Conservative MEP Daniel Hannan have such completely opposing views of Brexit that only at the most stupidly reductive level can they be said to amount to the same thing. There’s an “open” Brexit that is sensitive to the concerns of business and the economy, a pro-globalisation model that’s about reaching out into the world and trading openly, and there’s a “closed” model for little Englanders who would cut the noses off their faces if someone told them that they looked even vaguely European. The “closed” Brexiters are the ones who stoked fears about the numbers of migrants, the ones who played to the sense that Britain isn’t the place it used to be.

If he’s right, and Dominic Cumming’s smart, open Brexit was the one that won popular support, then he’s also right that Farage’s closed Brexit would’ve won – say – 7 per cent of the vote. That reduces the core of support for either option below the support for remaining in the European Union. Brexit is either a 7 per cent proposition or a 45 per cent proposition, depending on which model you favour. The more popular choice? 48 per cent voting for staying in.

Euratom is just the latest in what will be a long series of such arguments over everything from intellectual property to pharmaceuticals. The Brexit people voted for is like a restaurant that doesn’t exist, a place that caters to everyone’s appetite. Deep in their hearts, some of the people who campaigned for Brexit must know this, which is why blame is now being levelled against businesspeople, journalists, civil servants, and everyone with the courage to point out that a successful Brexit that satisfies the 52 per cent is an impossible dream. When you're accused of lacking patriotism for questioning something, it's a pretty solid sign that there are no good arguments left. That’s partly why it matters so much that the campaign was won on the back of untruths: if people are willing to accept and concede those lies, then they might finally admit that the place we’re heading towards isn’t a place that the majority of the population actually want to be. At some point we need to accept that 52 per cent of the voting public was sold an impossible, irreconcilable dream.

So long as politicians fail to recognise that the 48 per cent are actually the largest united group in this debate, we will continue to watch a Brexit argument dominated by opposing arguments over the future of a project that is doomed to frustrate and disappoint those who backed it. We stand on watching the divisions emerge, ignored by political parties who feel bound to respect a result that makes less sense by the day. Hog roast or nut loaf, real ale or green tea. Can we get back in the car yet?