The Guardian view on Brexit’s fantasy: waking to a nightmare foretold | Editorial

In the ninth season of Dallas, the 1980s blockbuster TV show about Texas oil barons, the handsome young scion of the Ewing dynasty – Bobby – appeared in the shower of his ex-wife and true love Pam even though the character had been killed off a year earlier. Dumbstruck viewers had to swallow the idea that 12 months’ worth of storylines had all been a dream. But the show’s declining ratings suggested the audience missed Bobby – and waking up from a slumber offered the cleanest way to recover Dallas’s mojo. Across Britain, lots of voters must think the same might be true of Brexit, reasoning that the decision to leave the European Union is a nightmare that the country needs to wake up from.

That might be one cause for the UK’s decision to sign up as an associate member of the EU’s £85bn Horizon research programme. Being outside the project meant UK science lost funding, collaborations, and key contact with EU universities. Getting back into the scheme – or at least most of it – was the right thing to do, because being fully outside was an exercise in self-harm. Negotiations to return were going nowhere until the Conservative party relieved itself of the delusional idea that the Irish border would be unaffected by leaving the EU, with its “Windsor framework”.

This outbreak of realism in Rishi Sunak’s Tory party is down to self-interest. Like Dallas’s falling ratings, the Conservatives’ poll standings are heading south. Public opinion has swung away from Brexit, with more than half the country thinking it was wrong to leave the bloc. Crucially, a chunk of 2016 leave voters have changed their minds because Brexit hasn’t delivered either on promises that it would energise the economy or on reducing immigration. Rather, leaving the EU probably made the cost of living crisis worse.