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LONDON — Three years ago, as Britons were preparing to vote in a referendum on whether to leave the European Union, the Conservative lawmaker John Redwood put forward a proposal: Rather than bet on negotiating a favorable trade deal with its former club, Britain should get ready to simply walk away.
But Mr. Redwood was an outlier, part of the Conservative Party’s euroskeptic fringe.
The mainstream Brexiteers, who led the campaign for leaving the European Union to victory, assured the public that all necessary agreements would be in place in time for Brexit.
Britain would still have “access to the single market,” promised Boris Johnson, who became the foreign secretary. Even Nigel Farage, Brexit’s ideological godfather, had said that “on day plus one, we will find ourselves part of the European Economic Area and with a free-trade deal.”
One of the mysteries of Brexit — one that will be studied by political scientists for generations — is how, for much of the country, a gradualist goal of achieving a less-restrictive relationship with Europe was replaced by an extreme and risky one: walking away with no deal at all.
But a large part of the population has shrugged off those warnings. A poll released by Opinium on Thursday found that if Parliament rejects Prime Minister Theresa May’s deal for a third time, 46 percent of respondents would prefer a no-deal exit over 39 percent who preferred delaying to allow for a public vote. Mr. Johnson declared in January that a no-deal exit “is closest to what people actually voted for.” Mr. Farage rolled out the slogan “No deal, no problem.”
A lot of this shift comes down to frustration. Even now, on the surface, life seems normal in much of Britain. But the psychological state of the country is more fragile after being held hostage for two years by a political process that never progresses, drowns out everything else and has only deepened the divisions exposed by the 2016 referendum. Many people here just want the noise to stop.
Gisela Stuart, a former Labour lawmaker who was one of the leaders of the Vote Leave campaign, said she didn’t even consider embracing a no-deal exit until four or five months ago.
“People like me wouldn’t have stood up and said, ‘Please, vote so that, after 40 years of a political and economic relationship, we just walk out,’ ” she said. “But can you say that, if after two years we cannot manage to negotiate an agreement, we should walk out? Well, maybe.”
Her frustration, she said, had become almost existential.
“I’ve spent 40 years of my life not needing a watch in the morning because I listen to the ‘Today’ program,” the BBC’s flagship radio news show, she said, reeling off the exact times, to the minute, of her favorite segments. “In the last couple of months I have not been able to bear to listen to it anymore. I switch to classical music. It is relentless speculation. It is no longer news. It is water torture. I can’t bear it anymore.”
The same sentiment has emerged in her constituents, she said. “Earlier, they said, ‘We want a trade deal,’ ” she said. “Now, they say, ‘We just want out.’ ”
Henry Newman, who campaigned for Vote Leave and is director of Open Europe, a policy group that focuses on Brexit, said he has seen “revisionism” from Brexit-supporting politicians who previously recommended more moderate outcomes, such as Norway-style close links to the bloc.
In recent months, he said, “there’s now almost an idea that any of these relationships will be a national humiliation.” For many ordinary voters, frustration with the process has “led to a sense, ‘Why can’t we just walk away?’ ” he said. “That’s in danger of becoming an identity pole, a center of gravity. It’s in danger of crystallizing into an identity.”
Back when Britain voted to leave, “no one was talking about no deal as an outcome,” said Asa Bennett, who covered the referendum for The Telegraph, the daily British newspaper. “The consensus was that of course we’d have a deal. It would be patently obvious. It didn’t even come on the radar.”
The notion that a no-deal exit was an option was powerfully normalized by Mrs. May herself, as negotiations with Brussels bogged down, and the complexities of removal became more obvious. In a tough-talking January 2017 speech at Lancaster House, she adopted a warning that had been used only by a small group of hard-line euroskeptic campaigners. She warned that Europe should not try to corner Britain into accepting a “punitive” deal, because Britain would walk away. It represented Britain’s main point of leverage, since Europe would suffer severely from a chaotic separation.
“While I am confident that this scenario need never arise — while I am sure a positive agreement can be reached — I am equally clear that no deal for Britain is better than a bad deal for Britain,” she said. She followed this up by articulating a series of “red lines,” promising to exit the customs union, single market and European Court of Justice.
Mr. Redwood, an anti-Europe voice in Parliament for decades, said the Lancaster House speech marked the moment when his group’s thinking became fully mainstream.
“That was the point of the slogan that we got her to adopt,” Mr. Redwood said. “It was very important, and it wasn’t one speech; she said it consistently.” He added, “In those days, she was advised by Nick Timothy, who was very much on our side.”
Ms. Stuart, the Vote Leave leader, said that phrase, which was later included in the Conservative Party manifesto, set off a significant shift in public perception. “It did mean suddenly that talk of no deal was no longer seen as an extreme position,” she said.
It was one of Mrs. May’s most resonant speeches, casting her in the mold of the Iron Lady, Margaret Thatcher, who famously “handbagged” opponents by digging out briefing papers from her purse, a gesture that typically signaled the approach of a political knockout blow.
Only as the negotiations reached their end point in Mrs. May’s withdrawal agreement, though, did the notion of a no-deal exit begin to gain currency as a positive outcome. Ms. Stuart said she came to the point reluctantly, out of disappointment with Mrs. May’s failure as a negotiator.
“If you would in your wildest dreams imagine a Tory P.M. would put us into this position — no, no my skills as a scriptwriter would have completely failed me,” she said.
Mr. Redwood also said she had failed, giving the European Union the impression that she was bluffing and would not go through with it.
“You needed to say it to provide leverage, but we also understood that she meant it,” he said. “Her more recent advisers didn’t mean it. The E.U. decided we were weak, weak, weak and wouldn’t walk away.”
For the public, said Tom McTague, who reports on Brexit for Politico, the talks have taken on the sting of a national humiliation, “and the natural reaction is to say, ‘Well, screw you.’ ”
“You set up these unachievable and conflicting goals, of a perfect trade deal with the E.U., pure sovereignty at home and no border with Ireland, and when you are forced to make a choice between them, you resent that choice,” said Mr. McTague, author of “Betting the House,” a chronicle of Mrs. May’s effort to build leverage in the Brexit negotiations by calling a snap election.
“The inherent complexity of Brexit is causing people to think, ‘Just rip the Band-Aid off, I can’t think about this anymore. Just rip the Band-Aid off, and let’s start again. We’ll take a little pain.’ ”
