Think of it as a coping strategy. Just as supporters of a team knocked out of the cup console themselves that “Now we can concentrate on the league”, so I have tried to reassure myself that a no-deal crash-out from the EU might not be such a disaster. That, you never know, it might even be a good thing.

Tory rebels send stark warning to Boris Johnson over no-deal Brexit Read more

Such a strategy remains necessary because no deal still waits for us on the other side of summer. It is, as the Brexiter ultras delight in pointing out, the legal default. It remains the law of the land unless and until MPs vote for something else. True, on Thursday, MPs placed an obstacle in the path of the likely next prime minister, preventing Boris Johnson from simply suspending parliament – which would have been a dictator’s move as well as a dick move – by requiring the Commons to sit through October. But that only makes no deal harder; it does not make it impossible. All it will take is MPs who were once staunch in their opposition to leaving the EU without a deal to fold. Amber Rudd has done it. This week Labour’s Sarah Champion did it. More could follow. For that reason, remainers need to gird ourselves for Halloween, to have a comfort blanket in the drawer, ready to cling to if the worst happens. Which is why I’ve been busy knitting these past few weeks, coming up with the arguments that might help us self-soothe. Here goes.

Perhaps no deal is what it will take to cure the country of its Brexit fever. Maybe nothing less than a complete severance of all ties is the only way to snap ourselves out of this delirium. Until now, for example, the Brexiters have been able to cast every hitch and disappointment as the handiwork of wicked remainers bent on thwarting Britain’s destiny. If there’s been no stampede of unicorns towards the sunlit uplands, that’s because the faint-hearts and fifth columnists connived with Brussels to deny the British people their will. A no-deal exit would end that betrayal myth once and for all. Nigel Farage, Jacob Rees-Mogg and the others would have got everything they wanted. They would be unable to cry treachery, because we would have left the EU the way they demanded we leave. They’d be unable to blame remainers or the judges or the BBC or the universities, because no one would have stood in their way. It will be their Brexit and they will have to own it.

Next, the Brexiters have dismissed every warning as Project Fear, including Thursday’s estimate from the Office for Budget Responsibility that no deal will kick a £30bn dent in the public finances, a projection that the OBR’s head explained was calculated on “relatively benign” figures and was avowedly “not at the most pessimistic end of the spectrum”. So perhaps the only way the Brexiters will ever be convinced is when they see and feel the consequences of no deal not as rhetoric from their political adversaries but as cold, hard reality – when they, or their constituents, see the lorries backed up for miles at Dover, the supermarket shelves empty of food, the medical supplies running out.

Above all, perhaps it will take the pain and chaos of a crash-out from the EU finally to lay to rest the imperial delusion that has long underpinned the Brexit cause. For decades, the conventional wisdom held that it took the humiliation of Suez to wake the British governing class from its dreams of empire and to realise Britain’s true, more modest place in the world. But the Brexit process has surely revealed the opposite: that those fantasies endured long after 1956; that the notion of Britain as a global superpower, held back and denied glory by pettifogging continentals, refused to die. Perhaps, then, it will take the blow to national pride inflicted by a disastrous exit from the EU to force Britain’s rulers to see the country as it actually is: no longer a global superpower, but instead a proud, successful nation whose strength depends not on breaking from its nearest neighbours but, in part, on its close ties to them.

Play Video 1:02 Philip Hammond says he 'greatly fears' impact of no-deal Brexit – video

These are the patches I’ve been stitching into a quilt ready to clutch the day Johnson and his enablers lead us to catastrophe. Like anyone who’s ever lost something precious, I’d find a way to tell myself it was for the best.

But, sad to say, it won’t work. I look upon this blanket of comfort and find it thin and threadbare. For one thing, how plausible is it to imagine that, even if Brexit is the total rupture Farage yearns for, he won’t still insist that the people were betrayed and that this Brexit was insufficiently pure? The betrayal myth will not be dispelled by anything so weak as mere facts.

Nor can we rely on the realisation of all those forecasts dismissed as Project Fear to shake Brexiters’ faith. Even if there are no tomatoes in Asda and no insulin in the hospitals, Rees-Mogg won’t blame himself or his fellow fanatics: he’ll blame the government (or Theresa May, if Johnson gives him a job) for failing to prepare properly.

And if, more likely, dawn breaks on 1 November and the sky has not fallen in, the Brexiters will claim victory. “See!” they’ll chirrup. “All those doom-mongers were wrong. Everything’s fine.” Because it’s possible that no deal won’t trigger an instant calamity, but rather act as a slow puncture for the economy, tipping us into recession, steadily destroying 200,000 jobs and shrinking wages. Expectations of a no-deal exit are so low, if Britons are not living in the streets wearing animal skins and foraging for weevils by Christmas, the Brexiters will declare it a triumph.

And even if it is an immediate disaster, visible on day one, there are few guarantees that leavers would admit their error and seek once more the embrace of Brussels. As Charles Grant of the Centre for European Reform puts it, “Just because babies are dying, does that mean they’ll say we were better off in the EU?” Aren’t they just as likely to blame the beastly Europeans for inflicting such a hellscape on an innocent nation? After all, even Boris Johnson once thought Britain could leave the EU and keep its seat on the European council of ministers. The Brexiters will cry, “How we were to know that leaving the EU meant leaving the EU?” And if they don’t blame Brussels, they’ll blame someone else: foreigners, minorities, anyone but themselves.

Most important, even if a no-deal Brexit delivered sweet vindication for remainers, it would taste bitter. No deal remains an appalling prospect; to flirt with it is, as Grant observes, “playing with people’s lives and livelihoods”. We cannot wish disaster on the country solely to exorcise our demons. Instead we have to keep fighting it with all our might – knowing there will be no comfort blanket to soothe us.

• Jonathan Freedland is a Guardian columnist