In a summer of impossible hopes, from football coming home to the second Mamma Mia! being better than the original, the lure of a Goldilocks Brexit is strong. It would be “just right” — neither too hot, cold, soft or hard.

The torment of the past two years has shown beyond doubt that a decisive, pain-free Brexit that delivers liberation from the annoying bits of the European Union without the UK paying a terrible price is illusory.

Those striving in government for a not-appalling outcome are in a pickle. The downsides of no deal are obvious. Bottlenecks of medical supplies, queues of lorries at the ports and a generally awful mood towards the UK in Europe after a hard Brexit would offset any potential gains for a long time — assuming they ever materialised.

On the other side of the balance sheet, Theresa May’s Chequers plan , in effect a shadowing of the customs union and single market, succeeded in purging her Cabinet of the most resistant Eurosceptics in David Davis and a destructive Boris Johnson . (A close ally says tartly: “Those who say she ‘lost’ Cabinet ministers after that weekend omit how much she was dying to be rid of them both.”) What this has failed to do, though, is rally moderate sceptic and Remain opinion around a compromise.

So having failed to deliver a plausible hard or soft Brexit with half a political year to go, more pliable senior ministers are weighing options for a scrambled Brexit which would see Britain leave the EU and then attempt to sort out everything else afterwards.

Leader of the Scrambled Brexit gang is Michael Gove , initially a fierce Brexiteer but more politically flexible than his caricature suggests. Along with many of the original Leavers, Gove has been irked by the veering of No 10’s policy and believes little progress has been made.

Hard-boiled Brexit proponents vent their fury over Chequers but have no clear support for a deliverable variety of their plan. They do have power in the Conservative Party, in that they could bring down Mrs May (notwithstanding the Eurosceptic curse, going back to the Portillo-Redwood split of the mid-Nineties, which ensures that however united they are against Europe, the combatants always end up in complicated feuds with each other.)

Soft Brexiteers are by now split between second-referendum supporters — a position understandably more popular in Opposition circles than in the Government — and those who wish Chequers would fly but know it is grounded by grassroots fury at home and EU negotiators waiting for London to give more ground.

A vacuum between the two implacable positions has thus arisen. Gove, who has the PM’s gratitude for not joining the Chequers revolt, is hoping to build support around a compromise position. In this version, Article 50 would be triggered next March but the Cabinet would accept that no agreement had been reached on post-Brexit arrangements in any detail. That would be postponed for a transition period lasting for two years.

Gove will argue it is better to deliver the letter of leaving, pay the Brexit bill in full (an EU red line) and then fudge the practicalities than hope to clinch a deal by March which will not happen — or leave with no deal and invite chaos that could engulf the Conservatives.

Politically, the success of this option depends on supporters of more hard-core approaches such as Liam Fox and Dominic Raab , the Delphic new Brexit Secretary, as well as born-again Brexiteers led by Jeremy Hunt accepting that Gove’s analysis is a credible compromise. It has upsides, the main one being that it delivers that thing-called-Brexit while being magisterially imprecise about its implications.

"A more pragmatic EU stance towards Britain may evolve in which case delay may not be such a bad thing"

It also satisfies those in the orbit of the Chancellor, Philip Hammond , who aim to avoid the jolt of hard Brexit and have always believed that the least-worst deal is the kind that takes a long time to deliver. Hammond risked his Chancellorship arguing for a long transition period. The Gove option would solidify that approach.

Electorally, it allows breathing time as long as the transition is concluded before the general election in 2022.

The downsides are obvious. May tried splitting the Brexit difference and has produced a fierce backlash. Scrambled Brexit will do that too, but it would at least show a realism about the impossibility of Parliament agreeing anything else. It is also an avoidance mechanism for an early general election: a considerable risk to the squabbling Tories.

My guess is that, having discussed the matter over the summer with colleagues, Gove will claim that he is proposing as much of a Brexit as is doable. A longer negotiation might take take place in a very different EU to the one that is running the show at present.

Already the European People’s Party is seeing its Christian Democrat majority whittled away by the rise of Christian nationalists. It might need to get more interested in allies, in or out of the EU.

Jens Spahn, the most charismatic of the possible replacements for Angela Merkel , struck a more conciliatory tone, smiling with May at the Salzburg Festival — and tweeting about post-Brexit EU and Britain having common values and needing to “find common answers”. It is possible that a more pragmatic EU stance towards Britain will evolve, in which case delay might not be such a bad thing.

By September the appetite for or aversion to scrambled Brexit will become clear. Gove’s pitch will recognise that neither of the existing hard/soft options has the remotest chance of working and so something else is going to happen. “Once you eliminate the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be the truth,” said Sherlock Holmes.