What May should have said to business: where have all the remainers gone?

It’s been the silence of the lambs. Theresa May took her case today to the Confederation of British Industry and was unnecessarily polite. Where have all you remainers, you Brexit sceptics, been these two years, she should have cried? We were told the massed ranks of British capital and commerce, of the City, agriculture, the professions and academia, were united against cutting ties with Europe, inside or outside membership of the EU. We were told that London’s finance, leisure and social services faced employment devastation. Where are these voices? Why has hard Brexit been left making all the running?

As soon as the referendum result was announced, the defeated remainers tried to pretend it had not happened. They demanded another referendum, which inevitably sounded like sour grapes and a denial of democracy. Some insulted Brexiters and others wasted time going to court. They even joined hard Brexiters in deriding such compromises as versions of the Norway option, the single market and a customs union. The case for soft Brexit went by the board. Remorselessly, Brexit came to mean hard Brexit.

Industry’s lobbyists even pretended they did not mind what happened, so long as business had “certainty”, which sounded suspiciously like self-interest. They somehow assumed that May’s negotiators would stay this side of insanity. Yet when she said she would admit only skilled immigrants, massively against London’s interest, the capital stayed silent. Its mayor, Sadiq Khan, has been a broken reed. Labour was left voiceless, a morass of uncertainty and unable to form a soft Brexit coalition. It has been reduced to the point where, in parliament, it is now shackled to the Tory right, to hard Brexit and anarchy.

At no point did remainers and pragmatists form a coalition to shout from the rooftops the necessity for Britain to stay in Europe’s common economic space. They divided and diluted their forces. When the inevitable compromise finally surfaced last week in May’s withdrawal deal, there was no lobby to give it purchase. Hard Brexit, now a de facto no-deal Brexit, was left totally in the ascendant. On every television screen, its champions went unchallenged, talking rubbish about reopening negotiations, about “rule-taking, not rule-making” and fantasy “deals with the rest of the world”.

The case for remaining in some form of single market with the rest of Europe is overwhelming. Many opinion polls suggest that is what most Britons want, even outside the EU. One day I am sure it will happen. But the cost and chaos of getting there has been immeasurably increased by the failure of former remainers to fashion an argument and give it political traction. They have snatched a second defeat from the jaws of the first.

• Simon Jenkins is a Guardian columnist