It was plainly obvious a deal was very unlikely as far back as when Theresa May was handling this. She said no deal is better than a bad deal and the EU said there can never be a deal that is better than membership so stalemate, and here we are years on and nothing has changed. Don't know who's been crowing about a deal since then, certainly not the leave voting public, the only crowing has been to get on with it and get us out, not to get a deal.
Boris Johnson himself said a deal was 'oven ready' (i.e. ready to go), but neglected to point out the contradiction noted above - that the EU will not accept a deal with the UK that involves the UK diverging from the 'level playing field', which of course is the entire point of Brexit as understood by those who voted to leave...
Any postering from the government that there would be a deal let alone a good one was frankly to give remainers something to cling to, politicians saying sweet words to placate people, fancy that. Leavers didn't expect one, it wasn't even on the ballot. However, didn't hurt to think positively and who knew, maybe the EU would cave but they didn't and hopefully in the next few days neither do we.
The only bit I agree with is the idea that most Leave supporters don't care about getting a deal and in fact many specifically do not want a deal.
But the truth is that No Deal was always a misnomer. Legally there has to be agreement on a whole slew of things, and much of this is already covered in international law by the Withdrawal Agreement (which, you may have noticed, the UK Government are already on the verge of breaking via the Internal Market Bill...). But there are aspects of the WA that require a further deal i.e. a trade deal to be struck in order to avoid bad consequences, like shattering the Good Friday Agreement, and like keeping businesses who depend on frictionless trade with EU states from leaving the UK etc.
What I think many/most Leave voters are failing to appreciate is that failure to strike a deal now only makes it much more likely that we need to strike a trade deal later... and as things get progressively worse in the UK, the less likely it becomes that the EU agrees to a 'good' deal. In other words, there
will be a trade deal with the EU eventually, but the longer we hold out for something better than what is on the table now, the more likely it is that we get something worse. Indeed, it may well follow that the UK ends up rejoining the EU without any of the concessions that we previously had.
And, as
@TenEightyOne noted above, this doesn't even take into account the likely, if not evitable, constitutional crisis in the UK that Brexit may bring.
