The past few weeks have been a rather a unsettling time in British politics. It goes without saying that there are sharply divided opinions both across the country and within Parliament - and indeed, within each of the political parties in Parliament and within each of the constituencies that each MP represents.

Many people have expressed desires - often for things that unfortunately cannot be delivered and it has proved, so far, much easier to identify propositions with which a majority of Members of Parliament disagree than to identify any proposition which is both achievable in practice and capable of obtaining the support (or at least the consent) of a majority in the House of Commons. This was never going to be easy - and, in retrospect one can pinpoint various strategic errors on all sides that have made it more difficult than it was otherwise bound to be.

But I think we are now coming to a time when proffering criticisms and taking stands and dreaming dreams are all trading at a discount. It is the finding of pragmatic solutions that can both be delivered in the wider world and be accepted by a majority in the House of Commons that is now at a premium.

I do not think there is any person alive who currently knows the answer to this puzzle. But, that is perhaps not surprising, because the answers to conundrums of this kind are not typically fashioned by the work of one mind. Nor do they arise from rhetoric and formal debate. Rather, they emerge from calm discussion between serious people, all of whom are seeking to find the common ground.

The good news is that discussions of this kind are beginning to occur, unseeen and unheard in the corridors and meeting rooms of Westminster. The less good, but inevitable fact is that all of this is likely to take a good deal longer to resolve than many of those who have fondly imagined a straightforward process once thought it would take.

My own view is that we will probably, alas, still be discussing these matters one way or another, for a considerable period to come. But I am heartened to discover that, whatever else may happen, there is a very clear consensus in favour of finding some process (whatever it may prove to be) that will lead us to some result (whatever that may prove to be), which avoids any grotesque disruption of our ordinary lives.

There was a point at which I genuinely began to fear that we might be driven into an absurdly damaging disruption simply by virtue of failing to agree at a sufficiently early stage on a sufficiently robust means of avoiding that outcome. But, if nothing else, I believe we have now seen that there will not be anything like a Parliamentary majority willing to permit such an event - and we will therefore have at least a sufficient degree of agreement on whatever it proves necessary to do in order to give us the time needed to find a solution that is deliverable and which can command the necessary degree of support in Parliament.