With 100 days to go till the Brexit deal is supposed to be done, can the country's divisions ever be reconciled?

If you are bewildered by the subject, you can at least be sure you are not alone in that

“Who knows about Brexit? Nobody’s got a f***ing clue,” Danny Dyer, a member of the cast of EastEnders, declared on ITV’s Good Evening Britain.

Jeremy Corbyn and Ed Balls were on the panel, listening as Dyer’s rant moved up a gear and he called David Cameron a “twat”. To judge by the reaction on social media, anything these two experienced politicians had to say on Brexit was eclipsed by the actor in full throat: a clip of his comments had notched up almost three million views by mid-morning the next day.

Dyer is also known as the father of the homophonic Dani Dyer, a contestant on Love Island, four of whose female participants scored another runaway hit on social media when they discussed Brexit.

“What’s that?” Hayley Hughes, aged 21, inquired.

Another contestant explained that the EU governs trading arrangements, which might have to be “cut down”. This prompted the anxious inquiry from Hayley: “Does that mean we won’t have any trees?”

She had, in fact, hit upon one of the many unknowns about Brexit – it could impact on the timber trade between Britain and the EU – but that was more accident than insight.

There is much that is odd about Brexit. It will affect us all, for decades, but it appears that most people are just not interested. YouGov’s tracker poll showed that in June 56 per cent of respondents found news about the issue “fairly” or “very” boring. Similar percentages admitted to varying degrees of confusion about what the Brexit policies of either of the main parties might be.

If you are bewildered by Brexit, you can at least be sure you are not alone. The nation is divided between those who believe they have some sort of clue about it and those who are letting it wash over their heads. The latter, who may well be the majority, should not be condemned for their seeming indifference.

After all, we have arrived at Brexit by a route we have never used before. It is customary in a democracy to delegate complex problems to professional politicians: voters choose at the ballot box between political parties; the parties decide what to do. But this was not how we reached Brexit. For only the second time in our history, a profoundly complex issue, fraught with vast implications for the economy and the UK’s foreign relations, was put to a popular vote.

The first time this was tried, in 1975, the public placed its trust in the political leaders of all three main parties, by voting for continued membership of what was then known as the common market. The second time around, 52 per cent of those who voted took the chance to raise two fingers to the political establishment, placing parliament under instructions to enforce a policy that neither the prime minister nor a majority of MPs would have supported had there been no plebiscite.

Danny Dyer on Brexit: ‘It’s like this mad riddle that no one knows what it is’ (ITV) (Good Evening Britain/ITV)

Centuries ago, the English fought a civil war over whether laws should be made by the king, through divine right, or by parliament. The upshot, to quote the 18th century Swiss writer Jean-Louis de Lolme, was that “parliament can do everything but make a woman a man and a man a woman”. Since the passing of the 2004 Gender Recognition Act, it is arguable that parliament even has the authority De Lolme said it lacked. Perhaps that old aphorism should be amended to say that the UK parliament can do everything but keep the UK in the European Union.

When parliamentary democracy is working normally, those on the losing side of a political argument can always hope to change MPs’ minds, or look to a general election to change the Commons – but there is no such avenue open to the 48 per cent who voted in 2016 to remain in the EU. This time, the majority decision is final, unless the minority can devise a way to invalidate the referendum.

This has left the two sides of the Brexit controversy as irreconcilable as royalists and parliamentarians in the English Civil War. That is a relevant comparison, according to political economist and journalist Will Hutton, who claims that those parts of Britain who voted for Brexit “almost precisely mapped support for the king in 1641”. In that analogy, the Brexiteers are Cavaliers; Remainers are the New Model Army. Hutton, a devout Remainer, of course thinks that the Roundheads were, and are, on the right side of history.

It is not simply that the leading Remainers and Brexiteers have opposing opinions. Each side brings to the field of battle an armoury of what they claim are facts, but the “facts” are contradictory. This is not normal in British politics, nor anywhere where there is a free press, as there is here. Though we are well accustomed to politicians making selective use of the facts to suit their arguments, there is normally an underlying layer of uncontested statistics and hard information from which they have to pick and choose. But in the argument raging around Brexit, it is as if the two sides inhabit alternative universes, and what is true in one is false in the other.

Theresa May commences a meeting with her cabinet to discuss the government's Brexit plans at Chequers (Reuters)

It is even disputed whether parliament is obliged to honour the result of the referendum. “The referendum was an advisory referendum,” the pro-EU Tory MP Dominic Grieve declared, as parliament assembled afterwards. Oh no, said the former Tory cabinet minister John Redwood: “This was not an advisory referendum.”

Or take the seemingly simple question of whether there will be a “Brexit dividend” when the UK stops paying an annual subscription to the EU. On questions of public finance, politicians and commentators alike will usually defer to the Institute for Fiscal Studies as an authoritative, nonpartisan source of information. Its head, Paul Johnson, declared on national television: “It’s simply not true ... there isn’t a Brexit dividend.”

Days later, Jacob Rees-Mogg retorted on ConservativeHome that of course there is a Brexit dividend, and it “is being delivered”. The leaders of the two main parties apparently agreed with him. Theresa May told the House of Commons: “There will be money that we are no longer sending to the EU that we will be able to spend on our NHS,” before buttressing her argument by quoting Jeremy Corbyn, who has promised that a Labour government would “use funds returned from Brussels after Brexit to invest in our public services”.

If the government cannot strike a deal with the EU before March 2019, the UK – with or without its Brexit dividend – will become a separate state, operating under World Trade Organisation rules. This prospect need not worry us at all, says Peter Lilley, a former Tory cabinet minister who took part in WTO negotiations. “The purpose of the WTO is to encourage free trade,” he told Radio 4’s Any Questions. “It’s not an obstacle to free trade. They have a legal obligation to facilitate us after we leave.”

But that is not what we read in the Brexit risk assessment drawn up by Airbus, one of the UK’s biggest manufacturing employers. They warned that “a no-deal Brexit would force Airbus to reconsider its footprint in the country, its investments in the UK”. On the face of it, that is a plain statement of fact – the verb used is “would”, not “might” – yet a cabinet minister, Jeremy Hunt, told the BBC’s Andrew Marr Show that “it was completely inappropriate for businesses to be making these kinds of threats”. A “threat” is not a fact.

Of course, a major sticking point in negotiations has been whether there will have to be customs posts and border checks across the island of Ireland if the UK were to leave the customs union, as Theresa May has said it will. Northern Ireland’s former first secretary David Trimble knows the answer, apparently: technology can render obsolete any need for a physical border. “Fears over a ‘hard border’ are only as strong as the refusal of those who do not engage with a workable technological solution,” he wrote in a paper published by the think tank Policy Exchange. The former Brexit secretary, David Davis, likewise told the BBC’s Andrew Marr programme that “a whole load of new technology” was coming on stream to solve this problem – to which the Irish prime minister Leo Varadker responded sarcastically: “I am not aware of the existence of the technology that Secretary of State Davis seems to believe exists.”

It is hardly surprising that half the public seems to have switched off completely under this bombardment of conflicting information, while those who are engaged take up entrenched positions from which no compromise seems possible. But why has it come to this? Why can’t the warring sides agree at least on basic matters of fact?

Andrew Adonis, a Labour peer and one of the most energetic Remain campaigners, has a succinct answer to that conundrum. He said: “It’s a bloodless civil war, so facts are not arguments, they are weapons.”

When last Friday’s long meeting at Chequers ended, it seemed that Theresa May had at last negotiated a truce, at least within her warring cabinet. No minister resigned there and then. But there was a catch. Anyone who resigned on the spot was going to be left stranded in rural Buckinghamshire, denied the services of the ministerial car pool. In days of old, inhabitants of these islands were prepared to be burnt alive for their beliefs – but for a cabinet minister to ride home in a common taxi would have been a monumental self-sacrifice, so they left in their ministerial fleet, all seemingly of one mind.

But it took only 48 hours for the resignations to begin, as Ms May’s truce disintegrated, and bloodless civil war resumed. There is no doubt that it will carry on now, right up to Brexit D-day, 100 days hence. Even that is not likely to mark the end. Instead, as Brexit takes effect next year (and beyond), we will be presented with one version of reality which says that Brexit has been a disaster, and another which says that it is all going splendidly. It will be a long time before the UK is a nation at peace with itself.

Today The Independent hosts a panel event in London to mark 100 days until the Brexit deal is done. Speakers include Independent columnist and Labour MP Chuka Umunna, Conservative former attorney general Dominic Grieve and pro-EU campaigner Gina Miller; as well as Conservative MPs Andrea Leadsom and Jacob Rees-Mogg. John Mills, the founder of Labour Leave, is also on the panel, which will be chaired by The Independent’s political editor, Joe Watts.

To watch the event online from 7.30pm, please subscribe to The Independent on YouTube, like us on Facebook and follow us on Twitter