Nor are former Remainers the only group who now lack a clear political home. The people who hounded Grieve for “betraying the will of the people,” the people who preferred a hard Brexit, the people who abandoned the Conservative Party in order to vote for the Brexit Party in European elections last year—they too may soon find themselves dissatisfied with the status quo. These are radicals. They wanted to overturn British politics, or at least change it forever. When nothing much happens on February 1—or March 1, or October 1, or potentially even next year—they may also become restless. The impact of Brexit is likely to be slow and incremental, hardly the sudden transformation that some Leave voters wanted. Immigrants will not disappear, and manufacturing will not immediately return to northern-English cities—quite the contrary. A very long, very tangled argument about trade deals is about to unfold, and it will not satisfy the revolutionary avant-garde.

In Strasbourg I met another kind of potential dissident. Robert Rowland, an MEP for the Brexit Party, told me that his experience there had been an “epiphany.” He’d met so many interesting people! Had such affable conversations! But his discovery of the reality of European democracy—he also used the words elucidating and enlightening—hadn’t given him any second thoughts about Brexit. On the contrary, he is one of the few people whom I’ve ever heard actually use the phrase Singapore-on-the-Thames in a non-sarcastic manner, as a positive description for what he wants his country to become: Low-tax, hyper-business-friendly, ultra-capitalist. Because this does not remotely resemble anything that Johnson promised during his election campaign—Johnson has hinted at more spending, more services—people like Rowland are now politically homeless too.

Read: Get ready for more Brexit turbulence

But the greatest potential for discontent is found not in Strasbourg or London, but in the Celtic fringe. The majority of Scots have lost the Brexit argument and are watching their country be redefined, too. They are now ruled by a Conservative Party that is heavily infected by the English-nationalist virus and appears to have lost all interest in Scotland—so much so that the popular Tory leader, Ruth Davidson, resigned last summer. The Scottish National Party won 48 of Scotland's 59 seats in Parliament in December.* The party dominates the debate in Edinburgh—but has no influence in London whatsoever. Inevitably, the drive for independence, or for some new forms of autonomy—or, again, for some political status yet unimagined—will grow. In defiance, the Scots have decided not to lower the EU flag over the Scottish assembly on Friday. An aspiration to be part of something different will be preserved.

Northern Ireland faces what might be an even bigger identity crisis. I happened to be in Belfast a few days after the referendum in 2016. What I heard repeatedly was: You forgot about us! And the English really had. The sudden, post-referendum realization that the European Union was an important element of peace and stability on the island of Ireland—it guaranteed an open border and allowed people to have two passports and thus two identities—came as a great shock to Brexiteers. As it became clear that protecting that open border was an EU priority—Ireland remains a loyal member of the union—many Tories who had long considered themselves staunch Unionists, supporters of the Northern Irish Protestants and of British Belfast, became remarkably less enthusiastic. “We can’t let those people hold us back,” one Brexiteer acquaintance once said to me, or words to that effect.