Brexit may indeed mean Brexit, though that looks a little less certain these days. But what else does it mean?

To answer the question of meaning, you have to delve back into history, especially in a nation where Brussels assumed the peculiar position of Rome in the English psyche in centuries gone by.

But there are some truths that are not really communicable in the usual think-tank reports with an executive summary. Sometimes you have to fall back on fiction to help people understand parallels that are actually a good deal stranger. So I have.

I have become obsessed with understanding the significance of Brexit in this way, especially the parallels with the 1530s – when England went through a sudden withdrawal from mainstream Europe and a parallel selling off of the public service infrastructure (in this case, the monasteries) to the new rich.

I have always said that this was likely to be repeated – first as tragedy and then as farce, as they say – but had not expected it so soon, nor predicted the strange alliance of May and the hardline Ulster protestants who would seek to bring it about.

Which is strange, because my Brexit thriller – set during the EU referendum and taking place on the Pilgrim’s Way – is just published, and imagines the conspiracy is led by a forgotten quango, still beavering away in the bowels of Whitehall, set up by Thomas Cromwell, and now dedicated to a protestant Brexit.

The novel is called The Remains of the Way  and is now available in most formats. It is strange that it should be published just as the extreme protestants re-enter government for the first time since the reign of Edward VI.

My other recent book Dunkirk also looks at a peculiar Brexit parallel, though much a more recent, and a much more sudden one…

* David Boyle is a former Lib Dem parliamentary candidate and the author of Tickbox (Little, Brown). You can buy the book from Hive or Amazon.