avid Frost, our man with (or, more accurately, against) the EU, negotiator extraordinaire, according to middlebrow newspaper analysis that reads like fan fiction, has hit his hard limit. Or has he? The government is floating an internal markets bill, unilaterally pleasing itself in regards to Northern Ireland, in breach of what has already been laid out in the withdrawal agreement. Or has it? Cynics, critics and remoaners aren’t buying it: isn’t this sabre-rattling exactly what Boris Johnson always does, just ahead of a major climbdown? Isn’t this exactly what happened, at exactly this point last year: the blaring siren of an imminent no deal, followed by the bromance of Johnson and Leo Varadkar resolving their differences at the last minute? The panicky mood around disintegrating negotiations just doesn’t stand up once you look at the detail: on state aid, the last major stumbling block aside from fish, both sides are willing to compromise. Our prime minister, not being a details man himself, is hoping that his supporters share the same flaw and will take this theatre as fact. Naturally, having been through all this before – not just with Johnson: Theresa May performed her own pantomimes of inflexibility – the sober-headed observer will seek to marshal that experience into some useful response. The sight of a government gripped by mid-viral fatigue, weakened both individually and collectively by a catalogue of failure, may give fresh hope to opponents seeking to strategise against their nightmare Brexit. How do we use our insights and their shortcomings to our advantage, to better oppose no deal, to forge a better Brexit and to reshape the narrative and the agenda? The wider experience of the Brexit process should teach us something else: opposing it is futile. No amount of sophisticated second-guessing will help us. The reason is not that the ardent Brexiters are cleverer or one step ahead, but rather that the project is oppositional in its DNA. This goes back to the start of the century, the moment John Redwood stood up to oppose the Treaty of Nice, to accuse the EU of an agenda more nefarious and explosive – and a lot more successful – than Guy Fawkes’s. This has always been a pugilistic movement, an attempt to transpose the implacable divisions of the cold war wholesale on to the fresh enemy of Europe. It has never had any interest in compromise, and consequently never had any use for reasoned analysis (or facts, or experts). Its aim is to dominate and ultimately obliterate its opponents. Not only will a reasoned and detailed critique not work: it just delivers fresh data for where next to take the discussion for maximum divisive effect. So a person might say, the Good Friday agreement is one of the most delicate and laudable achievements in British governmental history, and we jeopardise it not just at the peril of human lives, but of all that is dignified and good in the arc of progress. And Jacob Rees-Mogg will respond with the suggestion that people can be strip-searched at the border (sorry, “inspected” was the word he used), as they were during the Troubles. Someone might point out that there’s a problem with EU citizens’ rights, and the answer will return that they should go back where they came from, and take their British-born spouses and children, their expertise, their hopes and dreams, with them while they’re about it. We’re not looking at ham-fisted ministers caught on the hop, unfamiliar with the technicalities. None of this was ever an accident. It was the behaviour of people for whom Brexit was only ever an instrument of cultural and constitutional discord. It’s time to finally digest what we realised instinctively on 24 June 2016 – if the fundamental purpose of Brexit is to move from a politics of consensus to one of division, opposing Brexit only makes the project stronger. As the post-referendum remain movement tried, failed and sank, so many culprits were found. Was it the egos of centrist remain; the powerful minority Lexit voice in Labour; businesses and unions that were supine or undecided until too late; or an old-fashioned failure to cooperate by the stakeholders? It’s fair to say that everything that was done could have been done better. But all of this analysis worked on the assumption that we existed in a good-faith political environment where rational arguments land, and where politicians consider the national interest, the optics and the wealth and wellbeing of the citizens. And even once these assumptions showed themselves to be wrong, we too often thought that pointing that out was a solid argument in itself. It was not. Brexit, the project, drew its energy from the dismay of its critics. That doesn’t mean it would have foundered without us, by the way; it would have simply manufactured division within its own ranks. The only fruitful use of energy at this point is to hasten the decline of this government. There is a masochistic resignation on the opposition benches, where MPs prove their realism and humility by accepting the inevitability of a Conservative government until 2024. This is strategically mistaken. But, more importantly, it is unpatriotic. The scale of the coming destruction is both daunting and needless. The creation of perpetual crisis is the wellspring of this new breed of radical Conservative. It can only be quelled at its source, rather than lurched at, one catastrophe at a time. • Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist • Join the Guardian live event Are we heading for a no-deal Brexit? As talks reach a crucial stage we’ll be discussing this with Prof Anand Menon and Guardian journalists Sonia Sodha, Lisa O’Carroll and Jennifer Rankin. On Wednesday 9 September at 7pm