Throughout the United Kingdom, print and electronic billboards are barking out the command: Get Ready for Brexit. Many tick over with the number of days remaining until the October 31 deadline, a date weighing heavily on the minds of Boris Johnson and negotiators from both the United Kingdom and European Union. After repeatedly decrying Theresa May’s previous deal, Johnson was left to prove he could reach a superior settlement. Instead, he dragged his heels, lost multiple votes in Parliament, yet continued to insist he would “Get Brexit Done” all the while. Tensions boiled over after repeated aggressive off-the-record briefings by the government against Angela Merkel and other European leaders, and with time dwindling and anger at Johnson growing, he was dragged to the negotiating table and forced to put together his own exit deal at the last minute.

On Thursday morning, the president of the European Commission, Jean-Claude Juncker, finally tweeted announcing that a deal had been struck. The week before the announcement, negotiations entered a “tunnel”: Brussels jargon necessitating the absence of leaks and minimal media scrutiny, giving the press little to do but speculate about timeframes. When light finally appeared at the end of it, some of the Conservative reaction was near hysterical, as though Johnson had achieved something entirely impossible, before any detail was laid out and analysis could ensue. The Daily Mail breathlessly ran a headline claiming “the Eurocrats who damned him [were] queuing up to touch him like a prophet.” Expectations with Johnson run so low that like a small child finally mastering his first attempt at using a potty, he was lavished with praise, as the right hoped to snatch victory from the jaws of defeat.

That triumphalism lasted all of a few minutes. Government sources had briefed that the Democratic Unionist Party, on whose votes the Tories had relied upon to form a government after the 2017 general election, were on board and all issues on borders and trade were solved. The DUP immediately announced that they were not, furious at the attempt to bounce them into a deal, and announced again and again that they would not back the agreement, that it had “sold unionists down the river” and they would be actively voting against it when parliament sits for the first Saturday of voting since the Falklands War in 1982.