On Monday night, Oliver Robbins, Theresa May’s chief Brexit negotiator, left a dinner at the residence of the British Ambassador in Brussels and headed back to his hotel. During the chaotic summer of 2016, Robbins, who is forty-three years old, was chosen by May and Sir Jeremy Heywood, the former head of the civil service, to represent Britain in its talks with the European Union. A looming figure with a heavy brow, Robbins has been one of the Prime Minister’s most visible and enduring advisers ever since.

When Robbins arrived at his hotel, he joined some colleagues in the bar for a drink. A reporter for ITV News, one of Britain’s main news channels, was sitting nearby and overheard portions of their conversation, in which Robbins outlined the likely endgame to May’s torturous attempt to steer her Brexit deal through the House of Commons. As things stand, Britain will leave the E.U.—with or without an agreement—at 11 P.M. London time on March 29th. In the bar in Brussels, Robbins said that May is planning to make members of Parliament wait until the very last minute before giving them a choice between her unpopular compromise package with the E.U. or a lengthy delay to Brexit, during which the already agonizing negotiations would continue. “If they don’t vote for the deal,” Robbins is reported to have said, “then the extension is a long one.”

In politics, as Hannah Arendt said, “speech rules supreme.” Taken on its own, what Robbins disclosed was not particularly surprising, but, in the current Brexit vacuum, it was enough to dominate the news when the story broke the following day. Britain has been without a leader’s voice since December, when it became clear that May could not get her Brexit agreement through Parliament. On January 15th, when she finally tried, she lost by two hundred and thirty votes, the largest government defeat in British history. In the weeks since, there has been all manner of political fiddling—backbench amendments, unlikely alliances of M.P.s, non-talks between May and Jeremy Corbyn, the Labour leader, to find a way through the impasse—but nothing concrete has emerged. If anything, the respective positions of the E.U., May, and her opponents in Westminster appear to have become further entrenched. Patience is running out. “I’ve been wondering,” Donald Tusk, the president of the European Council, told a press conference in Brussels last week, “what that special place in Hell looks like for those who promoted Brexit without even a sketch of a plan how to carry it out safely.” On Tuesday, May told M.P.s to bear with her a little longer. “We now all need to hold our nerve,” she said.

Hold our nerve for what? May adopted a hard-line strategy for the Brexit negotiations a little more than two years ago. “No deal for Britain is better than a bad deal,” she said in a grand, set-piece speech, which she delivered in the long gallery of Lancaster House, a Foreign Office residence that, in the Netflix series “The Crown,” often doubles for Buckingham Palace. At the time, and until recently, the threat of walking away from the E.U. without any kind of agreement in place seemed like a piece of bad acting, a crib from “The Art of the Deal.” But, with Brexit now forty-three days away, the possibility of Britain suddenly losing its place in the international order—by accident or by design—is something that you can hear and feel.

Last week, the civil service advertised for staff at a planned “EU Exit Emergencies Centre,” to oversee the widespread disruption to Britain’s ports, food supplies, and general way of life that is expected in the event of no deal. Withdrawing from forty-six years of integration with European regulations and replacing them with nothing at all would complicate everything from aviation rules to fruit inspections to cross-border arrest warrants. The jobs at the E.U.X.E. center, which will operate around the clock for at least six months, were described in the ad as part of an “incredibly high-profile and complex Business Change/Transformation Programme.” Applicants should be “unflappable” and able to “see the emergency trends with little or no information and act appropriately at pace.” The keenest Brexiteers like to imagine a no deal as a kind of cathartic, revolutionary moment, from which a new, leaner Britain will emerge. The jobs at the E.U.X.E. are advertised as lasting for up to two years.

Businesses are panicking. Earlier this week, Britain’s Food and Drink Federation compared a no-deal Brexit to the outbreak of the Second World War. “This is the biggest threat that our members and businesses have faced since 1939,” Ian Wright, the group’s chief executive, told the BBC, predicting that a quarter of British food exporters would face bankruptcy if there is more than six weeks of delays at the country’s ports. The following day, the British Chambers of Commerce, which represent more than seventy-five thousand businesses, published twenty questions, on behalf of companies preparing for no deal, that May’s government has failed to answer. (Question No. 16: “Which regulator will be overseeing my business after 29 March 2019 and what rules do I need to follow?”) Multinational corporations are cutting jobs and moving projects out of the U.K. On February 3rd, Nissan, the Japanese carmaker, announced that it would no longer be making its new X-Trail S.U.V. in Sunderland, where it employs almost seven thousand people and where sixty-one per cent of voters decided to leave the E.U. Over all, car production fell by almost ten per cent in the U.K. last year. Britain’s latest official economic data, published on February 11th, showed that growth came to a standstill in December.

Medical supplies are likely to be interrupted if there is no Brexit deal. On Wednesday afternoon, I met Martin Sawer, the executive director of the Healthcare Distribution Association, which represents the logistics firms that transport the drugs used in Britain’s hospitals, pharmacies, and local doctors’ clinics. Around two-thirds of medicines used in the U.K. come from the E.U. The H.D.A. recently analyzed the typical contents of a pharmaceuticals warehouse and found that ninety per cent of its products had touched another country at some point. The vast majority of Britain’s cardboard medical packaging is made in Belgium—an unrecognized consequence of a quarter of a century of seamless trade with the Continent. “It grew up in the time of the single market,” Sawer said, of Britain’s current drug-supply network. “We don’t know any different.”

Last summer, officials asked pharmaceutical companies to stockpile six weeks’ worth of medicines, to weather a possible no-deal Brexit. That advice recently changed. Sawer has signed a nondisclosure agreement with the government, so he couldn’t tell me the exact plans, but he suggested that the problem lay at the Strait of Dover—the short crossing of the English Channel, which accounts for the vast majority of Britain’s truck traffic with the E.U. “Six weeks wouldn’t necessarily be enough for that route,” Sawer said. In January, the government chartered extra ferry crossings between France and the ports of Plymouth, Poole, and Portsmouth, to cope with congestion in the Channel. It also quietly introduced a “Serious Shortage Protocol,” which will allow pharmacists to supply alternative medication to what is listed on a patient’s prescription, in case of a civil emergency. “We are able to ration supply, if we have to,” Sawer said. Brexiteers often summon the memory of Britain’s wartime resilience to indicate that we have what it takes to survive a piffling showdown with the E.U. But the truth is that we are now a nation that makes barely a drop of insulin but that is home to millions of citizens with diabetes. “We’re all consumers now and we expect things immediately,” Sawer told me. “It is only going to take a couple of patients to be in trouble for the government to be seriously embarrassed, and they will come down and they will invoke emergency powers. That is where I think we would soon be. I don’t think it’s about fighting them on the beaches.”