“Do or die” has been Johnson’s position. He’d rather be “dead in a ditch” than fail to deliver Brexit by Oct. 31. “Get Brexit done” has been his mantra. He is now hoisted by his own petard. He has failed. He sank in the miasma of his own contradictions without even sighting his Normandy Beach.

The prime minister, who has no majority in Parliament, always saw Brexit as a means, not an end. It was the means to become prime minister. But now that he has hitched his wagon to that Sisyphean mission, he finds himself cornered.

Johnson’s deal is essentially his predecessor Theresa May’s with a few tweaks, none of them improvements. Its distinct status for Northern Ireland is likely to leave the province de facto (if not de jure) in the European customs union while the rest of the United Kingdom, where 97 percent of its people live, drifts off to become Singapore-on-the-Thames with uncertain access to its huge nearby European market. Uncertainty will persist for many years.

Britain is stuck. The Conservatives are in government, but they are not in power. The fantasy voted for in 2016 is not the reality of 2019. There was a democratic mandate for Brexit, albeit one based heavily on lies, more than three years ago. That was then. Democracies are exercises in constant reassessment. The core reason nobody has been able to deliver Brexit is it makes no sense.

As a British friend wrote me recently, “I’m just saying if I narrowly decided to order fish at a restaurant that was known for chicken, but said it was happy to offer fish, and so far I’ve been waiting three hours, and two chefs who promised to cook the fish had quit, and the third one is promising to deliver the fish in the next five minutes whether it’s cooked or not, or indeed still alive, and all the waiting staff have spent the last few hours arguing about whether I wanted battered cod, grilled salmon, jellied eels or dolphin kebabs, and if large parts of the restaurant appeared to be on fire but no one was paying attention to it because they were all arguing about fish, I would quite like, just once, to be asked if I definitely still wanted fish.”

Johnson, having failed, needs to ask the country if it still wants fish. That’s called a general election. As Jo Swinson, the leader of the Liberal Democrats, said, the issue must be “taken back to the public.” The sooner that happens, the better for poor Brexit-crazed Britain.

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