It takes an East German spy to follow the plot twists in Brexit endgame

The Brexit endgame is both very complicated and extremely simple. It now boils down to three short-term options. One is that Theresa May’s withdrawal agreement, tweaked, amended, fudged, stretched and yet recognisable as a process that allows Britain to leave the EU and yet stay close to it, finally gets through the Commons.

Another is that no deal, an option which a vanishingly small number of people in or outside Parliament would deem a smart idea, happens on March 29 because a fragmented Commons is incapable of expressing a majority against it. The third is that we rip it up and start again — either via a second referendum or a general election.

One of these outcomes will turn out to be true. But trying to assess which is not as easy as devout proponents of a particular course would like us to think. It reminds me of a sage piece of advice given to me by the late East German spymaster, Markus Wolf. The least reliable thing you can do in any fraught intelligence situation, with a lot of people pressing for their particular argument or interest, he observed, was to try to attach too much certainty to one option. The deciding factor would probably be something you had undervalued or not weighted properly.

I remembered this on the BBC’s Any Questions panel last Friday, when we discussed how the threat of no deal would affect what happens next. Sir Graham Brady, chairman of the 1922 committee, is a Theresa May loyalist who last week voted against her alongside ardent Remainers. At the other end of the panel sat a prominent Corbynite, shadow justice secretary Richard Burgon. He also averred that the Labour leadership did not want a hard exit from the EU at the end of March — but not enough for that consideration to dignify Jeremy Corbyn sitting down with Theresa May.

In between sat Layla Moran, the sparky Liberal Democrat MP whose focus was firmly on campaigning for a second referendum. That route requires Parliament to keep a non-Brexit option open. So supporters of a re-run have little reason to help May get a Brexit proposal over the line either. All had some justification for their view but the shared default position was that someone else needed to give ground to rule out a no-deal result. In other words, everyone was for compromise — as long as someone else compromised first.

May’s position recognises these paradoxes but she cannot find a workable alternative. She is derided for “putting party before country” but that is not quite right either. May — as a former intimate in the Brexit process avers — is in essence a “gravel-shifting Thames Valley Tory” at heart. She does not trust some artful variant of a Blairite Labour alliance with softy-tendency Conservatives to bring home the bacon. She thinks that Jeremy Corbyn will game the situation to create maximum political chaos.

“What will you do now?” I asked one of her closest aides as the disastrous vote on her withdrawal deal result rolled in last Tuesday. “Take the fight to Labour,” he replied, without missing a beat.

While her leadership style has been chilly and excluding, May genuinely believes that to be sustainable, a majority for a compromise Brexit solution must start with a softening of the Tory European Research Group Brexiteers and the DUP.

The rewiring of Nick Boles’s Norway-plus option as the Yvette Cooper amendment (a rebranding aimed at Labour MPs) challenges this view. It keeps Britain in the customs union and deals with the Irish backstop at least well enough to ensure the minimum of disruption across a sensitive border. It has everything going for it. Except for concerted opposition from two warring quarters — hardline Brexiteers and People’s Vote advocates.

One of the depressing things about this whole process is the way that fissures multiply — across the country, in Parliament, in Government, and then in factions within parties. The next spat to watch is the divide between Norwegian-style solutions, which would keep Britain in organisations such as the European Economic Area, analogous to the EU but outside some of its strictures — and the People’s Vote.

This contest will play out across next week, especially if substantial “indicative votes” happen, with a full array of choices. Barring a sudden dramatic shift in parliamentary numbers towards a second vote, the result will more likely be to move no-deal from the category of undesirable to undeliverable.

Amber Rudd, the Remainer with the closest personal links to May, has put herself at the head of that movement, now advocating for the right of Tory MPs to vote on amendments to the withdrawal agreement which would rule out an unregulated exit in two months.

The subtext is stark and increasingly ill-tempered in Cabinet. If the Prime Minister is not prepared to bend in the wake of last week’s humiliations, then an officers’ revolt will ensue. Perhaps May will face it down — she usually does in the short term. But this is the first major assault on the PM’s ability to set her own agenda from those who have been hitherto loyal and accepted the Chequers deal. And it is also a tragi-comic reminder of what an utter waste of time the last year has been in advancing a pragmatic Brexit.

Setting off for the high-altitude talking shop of Davos last night, I looked up what I had been writing about in this slot in January 2018. It was Philip Hammond, the Chancellor, prophesying the UK-EU relationship post-Brexit would be “two completely interconnected and aligned economies with high levels of trade between them [and] selectively moving them, hopefully very modestly, apart". When the Chancellor arrives in the Alps later this week, a puzzled audience of British and global business folk might be tempted to apply for a refund.

• Anne McElvoy is senior editor at The Economist.