It was reported this weekend that the great trans-Pacific trade deal (CPTPP), the one that Lord Cameron just boasted would ‘put the UK at the heart of a group of some of the world’s most dynamic economies’, will boost our economy by practically nothing at all. The OBR reckons CPTPP will put 0.04 per cent on our GDP over fifteen years.

The bilateral deals with Australia and New Zealand, meanwhile, are predicted to give a 0.1 per cent uplift. This is better, but still, hardly the piratical free trade bonanza we were encouraged to expect. A gold-plated special-friends deal with the USA shows no signs of materialising.

To what extent has pro-Brexit feeling shifted from being a political phenomenon to being a psychological one?

The same OBR continues to predict that we’re all going to be 4 per cent worse off than we would have been had we stayed in the EU. Even if you regard the OBR as a cabal of gloomadon-popping Rejoiner propagandists, these figures should give you pause, shouldn’t they?

Unless they are wrong by orders of magnitude – unless the OBR aren’t just putting a thumb on the scales but making their figures up completely, and in face of all the evidence – these trade deals are duds. In fairness, there are countercurrents: Nissan has just said that Brexit has not damaged its UK operations and they’re staying here for the long haul. But ‘not as bad as we’d feared’ is a step down from ‘a great improvement’. The general trend seems clear.

Even the viewers of GB News, not on the whole the most Europhile constituency in the country, seem to be cottoning on. A poll for the channel last year on whether viewers would vote for or against Brexit again, given the chance, returned 55 per cent for Remain against 45 per cent for leave. That caused a cherishably awkward moment for the presenter who, imagining it would say the opposite, had to read it out on air.

There are multiple visions of Brexit, as we should acknowledge. One is the free-trading, devil-take-the-hindmost, bonfire-of-the-red-tape, Singapore-in-the-North-Atlantic concept. Another is the protectionist, save-our-NHS, British-jobs-for-British-workers version. Still another is the politico-theological one, in which it doesn’t matter if we’re richer or poorer: we have something incalculably precious called ‘sovereignty’, which we didn’t have while we were bound to our neighbours by voluntary treaties, and we have now.

The 2016 vote was carried over the line, it should be uncontroversial to observe, by a muddled combination of all three, notwithstanding that in many respects they are contradictory. So we were to have lower taxes and lots of extra money for the NHS, frictionless trade and tight control over our borders – plus, because passport colour is a visible index of freedom, blue passports.

That was the apotheosis of the doctrine of cakeism. Those who favoured vision three – or, at least, who moved the goalposts there swiftly when the promises of visions one and two failed to materialise – certainly didn’t make clear at the time that this whole project was about an abstract concept. ‘Take back control’ was a slogan that winningly captured the abstract, theological side of the argument; –but it was backed by a series of more material hopes. And as the GB news poll seems to indicate, the failure of those material hopes weigh on the minds even of those voters fully on board with the original project.

The question that preoccupies me now is: to what extent has pro-Brexit feeling shifted from being a political phenomenon to being a psychological one? Nobody likes to admit they’ve been taken for a mug. And there can be nothing more aggravating than having every fresh failure of the project, every humiliating reverse, greeted with an almost gleeful ‘I told you so’ from the sort of people who told you so; and, worse, who were precisely the sort of people who you decided to vote for Brexit, in part, in order to spite.

The psychological aspect of it matters. It determines how big a core of voters there will be for whom there’s no material condition that could cause a change of heart. They will be the Brexit equivalent of tankies after the collapse of the Soviet Union insisting that communism hasn’t failed because communism was never properly tried.

This hardcore bunch will always find it easier to blame saboteurs, sell-outs, smug latte-sipping metropolitan liberals and the rest of the familiar gallery of caricatural enemies for our failure to reach those sunlit uplands than to look searchingly in the mirror. They aren’t persuadable. And, fine, we must leave them to stew.

Had Brexit been a success, by the way, there would have been versions of exactly the same people on the other side. I can’t imagine Steve Bray packing up his megaphone and going home when it became clear we were outperforming the EU. I can’t see hordes of ‘Follow back, pro EU’ (FBPE) types changing their social media profiles to the Union flag when they saw us signing brilliant trade deals worldwide, the NHS was flush with cash and our immigration policy fixed for good and all.

I like to imagine that a good many of us Remainers, though, would have had the grace to eat humble pie and admit we were wrong in whole or in part. Certainly, the GB News poll indicates that among Leave voters there are a growing number with the moral courage and pragmatism to do just that. Those are the persuadables. And the persuadables are the ones who matter.

The nice thing about the ‘will of the people’ is that it changes, and liberal democracies of the sort in which we lived before 2016 and in which we still live are specifically designed to accommodate that. So: where do we go from here?