Brexit means brexit: it means leaving an organisation and all that we’ve built up over 40 years and it will be both difficult and time consuming. It’s a big deal. People who have been told they should expect an easy negotiation, a straightforward transition with no need for a period of adjustment will react badly when that turns out to be untrue.

Sovereignty is not a one-way street; neither is brexit. Having chosen to leave, we cannot sensibly expect the EU to change, to alter its behaviour for us. We have chosen to become independent and compete with the EU: we need to accept being treated as independent competitors

The EU is very good at process, and we need to start taking the process seriously, to get much better at managing the process, if we expect to come out the other side of brexit with anything worth having.

It is not possible to suggest that there is only one way to leave the EU that happens to be the way the government of the day, or certain leave campaigners, choose to leave. The method, the distance from the EU etc were not on the ballot and it is dishonest, disenfranchising and fundamentally and unnecessarily limiting to insist otherwise. Where we end up, our post-brexit relationship with the EU will be as a result of political choices made by our government, not by the electorates vote in the referendum.

WTO rules are not good enough for the UK. It is not possible to argue both that it is perfectly fine to leave a deep free trade agreement with easily our largest export and import market for the next generation, and trade on WTO terms because that is how we and others trade with everyone else……. AND argue that it is imperative we get out of the EU in order that we can strike preferential trade deals with large parts of the rest of the world, because the existing terms on which we trade with the rest of the world are intolerable. .

The huge problem for the UK with either reversion to WTO terms or with a standard free trade deal with the EU is in services. And make no mistake, the current plan sacrifices the UK’s trade in services where we run a healthy surplus, for limiting freedom of movement.

There is no such thing as a trade deal + . “Pluses” merely signify that all deficiencies in the named deal will miraculously disappear when we Brits come to negotiate our own version of it and are simply not true.

Transparency is important in politics. You cannot and should not try to hide the reality of this kind of negotiation from the electorate. You can’t possibly run one of the largest and most complex trade negotiations on the planet, and leave people in the dark about the extremely difficult choices we shall face. The electorate need to be aware of the choices and inevitable trade-offs that the UK will need to make.

Real honesty with the public is the best – the only – policy if we are to get to the other side of Brexit with a healthy democracy, a reasonably unified country and a healthy economy. And we haven’t seen much honesty from either side of the debate in the UK so far. That has to change.

Real honesty with the public is the best – the only – policy if we are to get to the other side of Brexit with a healthy democracy, a reasonably unified country and a healthy economy.

The debate of the last 30 months has suffered from opacity, delusion-mongering and mendacity on all sides.

The Prime Minister’s call for opponents of her deal to “be honest” and not simply wish away intractable problems like the backstop, which was always, and will remain, a central question in any resolution of the issue, is reasonable enough.

And at the extremes we have the “no dealers” quite happy to jump off the cliff, lying openly about the extent to which WTO rules provide a safety net if we did, and producing fantasy “managed no deal” options which will not fly for the reasons I have set out.

And the “people’s voters”: they want a second referendum with remain on the ballot – for which one can make a case, given the dismal place we have now ended up, and given possible Parliamentary paralysis, but must surely understand the huge further alienation that would engender amongst those who will think that, yet again, their views are being ignored until they conform.

Where is the great idea or plan to address that alienation?

And even now we can hear a Shadow Cabinet Member promising, with a straight face, that, even after a General Election, there would be time for Labour to negotiate a completely different deal – INCLUDING a full trade deal, which would replicate all the advantages of the Single Market and Customs Union.

And all before March 30th. I assume they haven’t yet stopped laughing in Brussels.

Too much of our political debate just insults people’s intelligence and suggests that every facet of Brexit you don’t like is purely a feature of only the Prime Minister’s version of it, rather than intrinsic to leaving.

The Prime Minister’s deal is obviously a bad deal. But given her own views and preferences, her bitterly divided Party and the negotiating realities with the other side of the table, I can at least understand that she is on pretty much the only landing zone she could ever reach.

Those aspiring to a radically different one owe us honest accounts, not pipedreams, of how they propose to get there, and the timescale over which they will.

But the dishonesty of the debate has, I am afraid, been fuelled by Government for the last 2½ years.

It took ages before grudging recognition was given to the reality that no trade deal – even an embryonic one – would be struck before exit, and that no trade deals with other players would be in place either.

Even now, though, the Prime Minister still talks publicly about the Political Declaration as if it defined the future relationship with some degree of precision, and defined it largely in line with her own Chequers proposal, when it simply does neither.

It is vague to the point of vacuity in many places, strewn with adjectives and studiously ambiguous in a way that enables it to be sold as offering something to all, without committing anyone fully to anything.

Any number of different final destinations are accommodable within this text, which was precisely the thinking in drafting it, to maximise the chances of it being voted through, when all the EU side was really determined to nail now was within the Withdrawal Treaty: rights, money and the backstop.

For the same reason – the desperate inability to acknowledge that it was going to take very many years to get to the other side of the Brexit process – we have had the bizarre euphemism of the “implementation period” after March 2019, when there is nothing to “implement”, and precisely everything still to negotiate.

I dislike the “vassal state” terminology, but anyone can see the democratic problem with being subject to laws made in rooms where no Brit was present and living under a Court’s jurisdiction where there is no British judge.

And if we are to avoid the backstop coming into force, we are now going to end up prolonging the transition, because the FTA won’t be done by the end of 2020, and the EU well knows the

U.K. won’t be keen on cliff jumping in the run up to an election.

We have had the several bizarre contortions over trying to invent a Customs proposal which enabled us to escape the Common External Tariff but still derive all the advantages of a quasi Customs Union. Even the all U.K. backstop proposal has ended up being called a temporary Arrangement, when we all actually know it to be a temporary Union, as nothing else could fly under WTO rules. But the U word is too toxic for polite company evidently.

On the backstop itself, it was obvious, reading the December 2017 Agreement document from outside Government that this must lead inexorably to where we have now reached.

There was no other endgame from that point.

But we got sophistry, evasions, euphemisms and sometimes straight denials at home, whilst in the EU, the PM and senior Ministers several times appeared to be backsliding on clear commitments as soon as they saw draft legal texts giving effect to agreements they had struck.

That deepened the distrust and if anything hardened the EU’s resolve to nail the issue down legally. And, from the apoplectic reaction to the Attorney General’s advice, which elegantly stated the totally obvious, you can now rather see why.

There is no point in my speculating here precisely on what might now get manufactured and its legal status. The EU is always very adroit at such exercises in solemnly reframing things which have already been agreed in ways that make the medicine slip down.

But however they re-emphasise their intention, which I believe, that the backstop should not be permanent, it is the very existence of it in conjunction with the cliff edge which will dictate the shape of the trade negotiations.

We may well now be beyond the point at which any clarification Declaration or Decision can sell.

And if we are, it’s largely because the whole conduct of the negotiation has further burned through trust in the political class.

That should force a fundamental rethink of how the next phase is conducted; whether this deal staggers, with some clarification, across the line in several weeks time and we go into the next phase with the cards stacked, or whether we have a new Prime Minister who attempts to reset direction, but will find, as I say, that whatever reset they attempt, rather a lot of the negotiating dynamics and parameters remain completely unchanged.

Either way, the final lesson is that we shall need a radically different method and style if the country is to heal and unify behind some proposed destination.

And that requires leadership which is far more honest in setting out the fundamental choices still ahead, the difficult trade offs between sovereignty and national control and keeping market access for our goods and services in our biggest market, and which sets out to build at least some viable consensus.

The time to lose ourselves in fairy tales has ended. Our politicians can no longer get away with strutting and fretting or with sound and fury. It’s time to wake up from the dream and face the facts.

Transparency is important in politics. You cannot and should not try to hide the reality of this kind of negotiation from the electorate.

At virtually every stage in this negotiation, the EU side has deployed transparency, whether on its position papers, its graphic presentations of its take on viable options and parameters, its “no deal” notices to the private sector to dictate the terms of the debate and shape the outcome.

A secretive, opaque UK Government, hampered mainly by being permanently divided against itself and therefore largely unable to articulate any agreed, coherent position, has floundered in its wake.

It is a rather unusual experience for the EU – always portrayed as a bunch of wildly out of touch technocrats producing turgid jargon-ridden Eurocrat prose up against “genuine” politicians who speak “human” – to win propaganda battles.

Let alone win them this easily.

But, in fairness, bruising experiences over recent decades as it has had to cope with demands for vastly greater transparency in its conduct of trade policy have forced Brussels to up its game.

Failure to do so would mean losing all public support for driving trade liberalisation and signing trade deals – which, whether U.K. politicians wish to believe it or not, is what the EU does more of than any other trade bloc on the planet at the moment.

There is absolutely no chance of doing deals with Japan, Canada, the US or Mercosur – or indeed, the UK when that moment comes – unless you can explain comprehensibly to your publics what is in it for them.

The battle for free trade policies – always difficult in the US – has, after all, gone rather convincingly backwards in both major US parties in the last 20 years. Alas, much of the Tory Eurosceptic Americanophile Establishment appears not quite to have noticed that.

To be clear, this is not an argument that by applying lipstick to the pig of the Chequers proposal, or the proposed deal now on the table, the course of history would have been changed.

You can’t redeem a bad deal by advertising on Facebook.

But the negotiation process, politically, in and beyond Parliament, had to be different from the outset. And it will have to be different at the next stage. You can’t possibly run one of the largest and most complex trade negotiations on the planet, and leave most supposed insiders, let alone a much wider public, in the dark about the extremely difficult choices we shall face.

At extremely sensitive stages negotiators of course have to disappear into a “tunnel”, to have any safe space in which to explore potential landing zones. That is inevitable.

But this Government has repeatedly failed to explain to a wider audience what the real constraints and trade-offs are in arriving at the sort of landing zone the Prime Minister views as some combination of desirable and unavoidable.

And because of that choice, the electorate are vastly unprepared and frankly bitterly disappointed by each and every compromise the UK makes as part of those negotiations.

There is no such thing as a trade deal + . “Pluses” merely signify that all deficiencies in the named deal will miraculously disappear when we Brits come to negotiate our own version of it.

As the scale of the humiliation they think the Prime Minister’s proposed deal delivers started, to dawn on politicians who had thought Brexit was a cakewalk – we have seen a proliferation of mostly half-baked cake alternatives. They all carry at least one plus. Canada has acquired many.

Besides “Canada +++” or SuperCanada, as it was termed by the former Foreign Secretary, we have Norway +, which used to be “NorwaythenCanada” then became “Norwayfornow” and then became “Norway + forever”. And now even “No deal +”, which also makes appearances as managed no deal” and “no deal mini deals”.

What is most depressing about the nomenclature is the sheer dishonesty.

The pluses are inserted to enable one to say that one is well aware of why existing FTA x or y or Economic Area deal a or b does not really work as a Brexit destination, but that with the additions you are proposing, the template is complete.

We even have the wonderfully preposterous sight of ex Brexit Secretaries alleging that the very Canada + deal they want has already been offered by Presidents Tusk and Juncker and that all that needs doing is to write this as the destination into the Political Declaration.

But let me tell you, as someone dealing with both at the outset of this process: what the EU Institutions mean by Canada + is not remotely what ex Brexit and Foreign Secretaries and the Institute of Economic Affairs scribes mean by it. The title page is the same; the contents pages are different.

Not for nothing did an unkind Brussels source label Boris Johnson’s plan A+ ( another + of course), Chequers 3.0.

It is nonsense. And aside from containing a wish list an understandable wish list – of things that are not actually present in Canada’s EU deal, it does not solve the backstop.

“No deal+” is brought to us courtesy of all the people who told a great free trade deal would be struck before we even left because the mercantile interests of key manufacturing players in Member States would prevail against the pettifogging legalistic ivory tower instincts of the Brussels ayatollahs.

Yet, as some of us forecast well over 2 years ago, it did not turn out like that. And that the Brussels theologians exhibited rather more flexibility than the key Member States when it came to the crunch.

And not a peep was heard from the titans of corporate Europe. Except to back very robustly the position in capitals that the continued integrity of the Single Market project was vastly more important to them than the terms of a framework agreement with the U.K. A position which won’t change during the trade negotiations ahead either.

The “no deal + “ fantasy is that if we just had the guts to walk away, refuse to sign the Withdrawal Agreement with the backstop in it, and withhold a good half of the money the Prime Minister promised this time last year, capitals, suddenly realising we were serious, would come running for a series of mini deals which assured full trading continuity in all key sectors on basically unchanged Single Market and Customs Union terms.

I don’t know what tablets these people are taking, but they must be very very good.

The reality is that if the deal on the table falls apart because we have said “no”, there will not be some smooth rapid suite of mini side deals – from aviation to fisheries, from road haulage to data, from derivatives to customs and veterinary checks, from medicines to financial services, as the EU affably sits down with this Prime Minister or another one.

The 27 will legislate and institute unilaterally temporary arrangements which assure continuity where they need it, and cause us asymmetric difficulties where they can. And a UK Government, which knows the efficacy of most of its contingency planning depends, to a greater or lesser degree on others’ actions out of its control, will then have to react – no doubt with a mixture of inevitable compliance and bellicose retaliation.

We already see the next generation of fantasies out there, and it’s now just a matter of time before a Tory leadership contender offers them publicly as the Houdini act.

A suite of very rapid legal mini deals, accompanied by the existing Withdrawal Agreement deal on citizen’ rights, the complete dropping of the backstop, and only paying the remainder of the £39billion cheque when the mini deals have turned into the miraculous Canada (with lots of pluses) deal.

All of which must happen in months. But of course…

To which the EU answer will be a calm but clear “Dream on. You still want a transition? All existing terms and conditions apply. And when it comes to any FTA – deep or shallower – “nothing is agreed till everything is agreed” – and that still includes the fish”.

They may put it slightly more politely. But not much, in the circumstances.

And to anyone who tells me – and we’ll hear plenty of it in the coming weeks, I assure you – “but the EU stands to lose access to London’s capital markets and their companies will suffer unless they do our quick and dirty “no deal” deal”, I think I would just say “even the last 30 months have evidently still not taught you how the EU functions: try again in another 30…”,

If we lurch, despite Parliament wishing to avoid it, towards a “no deal”, with delusions it can be “managed” into a quick and dirty FTA, that will not end happily or quickly.

I am in no position to second guess those who have to try and model the macro effects of such a scenario. No developed country has left a trade bloc before, let alone in disorderly fashion, and let alone one which has become a lot more than a trade bloc.

But I do fully understand the legal realities. And because so-called “WTO rules” deliver precisely no continuity in multiple key sectors of the economy, we could expect disruption on a scale and of a length that no-one has experienced in the developed world in the last couple of generations.

The complacency that such things cannot and would not ever really happen in modern economies is staggering. Mercifully, it is not shared in either Whitehall or the Berlaymont. But these are outcomes which proper political leadership is about both understanding, contingency planning against – and avoiding.

Markets continue to react, or have until this week, as if something must turn up and that “no deal” is a virtually unimaginable scenario for politicians professing to be serious, to contemplate. That risk has therefore been seriously underpriced for a year or more, because we are dealing with a political generation which has no serious experience of bad times and is frankly cavalier about precipitating events they could not then control, but feel they might exploit.

Nothing is more redolent of the pre First World War era, when very few believed that a very long period of European peace and equilibrium could be shattered in months.

The huge problem for the UK with either reversion to WTO terms or with a standard free trade deal with the EU is in services.

This is the curious case of the dog that has largely failed to bark so far. The public needs to be aware of the big trade-offs that are coming next…or resentment when the next set of climbdowns begins will be off the scale.

So far, both during the referendum and since, the trade debate has been dominated by trade in goods, tariffs issues and some discussion of the impact on manufacturing supply chains of departing the Single Market and Customs Union.

Politicians find goods trade and tariffs easier to understand than services trade and the huge complexities of non tariff barriers in services sectors. They just do not understand the extent to which goods and services are bundled together and indissociable (when did you last buy a mobile phone outright rather than a service contract with a mobile phone attached).

They even more rarely grasp how incredibly tough it is to deliver freer cross border trade in services which, by definition, gets you deep into domestic sovereignty questions in a way which makes removing tariff barriers look easy.

And they understand even less that, however imperfect they think EU attempts at internal cross border services liberalisation might be, anyone who has negotiated with the US, China, India, Japan or sundry others can tell them why far-reaching market-opening services deals are few and far between.

It isn’t going to happen.

As the Prime Minister gradually backed away from her original red lines, as she realised she would imperil large tracts of UK manufacturing if she persisted with it, the position softened on quasi Customs Union propositions. Hence the constant howls of betrayal from those who thought October 2016 and Lancaster House mapped the only true path to Brexit.

Her only way to seek to sell this politically – so far with very little sign of success – was to talk boldly about greater autonomy and divergence in services regulation.

The reality is that UK services’ industries needs have been sacrificed to the primary goal of ending free movement.

And post exit, and post the end of any transitional arrangement, it is UK services exporters who will face the starkest worsening of trade terms because of the substantial difference between how far services trade is liberalised under even the highly imperfect European services single market, and the very best that is achievable under any other form of free trade or regional agreement on the planet.

Yet it is in services sectors where the U.K. currently has a sizeable trade surplus with the EU, whereas in manufactured goods we have a huge deficit.

For all the imperfections of the Single Market, services trade between Member States is, in many sectors, freer than it is between the federal states of the US, or the states in Canada. The US Government is unable, even if it were willing, to deliver on commitments in many areas in international negotiations, just as it cannot bind its states on government procurement, on which many federal states are as protectionist as it gets.

Not that one ever hears a squeak on this from those who rail at EU protectionism.

But the extent and type of cross border free trade that exists in the Single Market, ceases when you leave. A very large proportion of cross border services trade conducted outside the Single Market only happens because firms have offices physically established in the countries to which they are exporting.

So we know already that cross border supply will diminish pretty radically post exit, and that ease of establishment of legal entities and ambitious deals on the temporary free movement of workers and on the mutual recognition of qualifications will be central to trying to sustain trade flows in much colder conditions, to limit the impact on the U.K. economy.

But a substantial hit on the balance of trade and on the public finances of substantial relocations out of the UK’s jurisdiction is guaranteed, because we have rendered the best mode of supplying services across borders far harder.

The implications are obvious. And again the public is not being told of them. Because the fiction has to be maintained – at least until a first deal is done – that there will be no sort of preferential free movement terms for EU citizens.

We stagger on, with the government constantly postponing the long promised White Paper on immigration post Brexit.

And after it eventually does get published, we know that, in reality, once the FTA negotiations truly get under way, and reality bites on the UK side, the policy, like so many others in the last 30 months, will simply disintegrate in the face of negotiating imperatives.

The EU already knows that the UK will, under whoever’s Premiership, be prepared to pay a heavy price to maintain better access to business, legal, consultancy, and financial services markets than other third countries have, to date, achieved via standard FTAs. Why? Because that’s an economic imperative for a country which has world class services capability, but needs market access.

That EU leverage will be deployed in the years ahead and it will be used to enforce deals on issues like fisheries, on which again referendum campaign commitments will be abandoned in the teeth  of reality.

Those saying this now will of course get the ritual denunciations for defeatism, lack of belief, treachery and whatever.

But just give it 2 more years. The Brexiteers, the strength of whose case to the public always resided, as I say, in saying to the public that their leaders had mis-sold them on what the EU was becoming, have now done their own mis-selling. And they are in the middle of the painful process of discovering that, as trade terms worsen on exit, which they denied would happen, they will, under economic duress, have to let down the very communities to whom they promised the post Brexit dividend.

That penny is dropping. Just very slowly.

If WTO terms or existing EU preferential deals are not good enough for the UK in major third country markets, they can’t be good enough for trade with our largest market.

You cannot simultaneously argue that it is perfectly fine to leave a deep free trade agreement with easily our largest export and import market for the next generation, and trade on WTO terms because that is how we and others trade with everyone else…

….AND argue that it is imperative we get out of the EU in order that we can strike preferential trade deals with large parts of the rest of the world, because the existing terms on which we trade with the rest of the world are intolerable.

If moving beyond WTO terms with major markets represents a major step FORWARD in liberalising trade, then deliberately moving back to WTO terms from an existing deep preferential agreement – which is what the Single Market is – represents a major step BACKWARD to less free trade. You really can’t have it both ways.

Though obviously many can and do try to argue that black is white and vice versa. But it is well beyond incoherent.

It is fine and legitimate to argue that the UK should aim at a global lattice work of bilateral and plurilateral free trade deals. This is especially true in the current absence of any ability to drive forward major multilateral trade liberalisation, at a time when the US has turned inwards, and may indeed be setting about deliberalising trade, undermining the World Trade Organisation..

It is equally legitimate to argue that you only want free trade deals which stop well short of the intrusion on national sovereignty which Single Market harmonisation and mutual recognition via supranational legislation, adjudication and enforcement entails.

As long as one also recognises that all trade deals inevitable erode and trammel one’s sovereignty to some degree – often to a significant degree.

Binding international commitments to opening each other’s markets – on goods, services, government procurement, whatever – seriously limit one’s capacity to regulate sectors of the economy as one might ideally see fit.

Genuinely free global trade actually seriously trammels national sovereignty. This should be obvious to everyone – it is not news.

Possibly the greatest reason to be a passionate free trader is to curtails the ability of myopic politicians to erect barriers to commerce in the name of sovereignty and national preference against non-national producers.

This is why our current debate on sovereignty and “taking back control” is often so bizarre. It is comical listening to Right wing populist politicians claiming they are avid free traders and simultaneously saying that one of the purposes of taking back control is to be able to rig domestic markets / competitions in favour of British suppliers / producers.

Protectionism is always someone else’s sin, of course.

And the Tory Party has been through these – decades-long – spasms before. Joseph Chamberlain’s Tariff Reform and Imperial Preference campaign, as loudly pious, nationalist and messianic as many today, led all the way through to his son Neville’s protectionist legislation of the early 1930s which helped worsen a post financial crisis economy. Sound familiar?

A post Brexit Britain which is committed to openness and free trade will need first of all to run hard to stand still, as 2/3 of UK exports are currently either to the EU or to countries with whom the EU has a preferential trade deal, which we shall have first to try and roll over.

Market access into the EU WILL worsen, whatever post exit deal we eventually strike. And the quantum by which our trade flows with the EU will diminish – and that impacts immediately – will outweigh the economic impact of greater market opening which we have to aim to achieve over time in other markets, where the impact will not be immediate but incremental.

As the country debates its future trade policy in the next stage of negotiations both with the EU and with other sizeable markets it needs honesty from politicians that trade agreements take a long time.

That even if every one we aspire to were completed, this will have a really very modest impact on overall UK economic performance.

And that every version of Brexit involves a worsening of the UK’s trade position and a loss of market access to its largest market. As we strive to limit the extent of that worsening, public debate will have to be serious about what the real trade-offs are. Because the EU will be quite brutal in teaching us them.

Meanwhile, before we have even left, we have seen, in the last 2 ½ years, the most anaemic boost to UK net trade triggered by ANY major sterling devaluation since World War 2. For politicians not completely blinded by their own rhetoric, the warning signs for the UK economy as we worsen our trade terms with the Continent are there to see. Again, public debate needs to be based on the realities, not on fantasy. Or the reality will soon catch up with us.

It is just not possible or democratic to argue that only one Brexit destination is true, legitimate and represents the revealed “Will of the People” and that all other potential destinations outside the EU are “Brexit in Name Only”.

The public voted – in huge numbers – and the majority voted to “leave” and not to “remain”. That much is very clear. But people were not asked to give their reasons for voting “leave” or “remain”, and they were multifarious on both sides.

For decades, some of the staunchest standard bearers of the case for leaving the post Maastricht Treaty EU have made the case for staying in the so-called Single Market, remaining a signatory to the EEA Agreement but leaving the institutions of political and juridical integration of the Union.

Over the years there have been plenty of eurosceptic tomes – many very well argued, whether you agree with them or not – arguing that Maastricht, amplified by subsequent Treaties, represented the wrong turn in European integration, and that what we needed to do was to return to the essential mercantile ideas behind the internal market project and jettison U.K. adherence to the rest.

For many people, perhaps especially outside the metropolitan circles who obsess about post Brexit models, that sense of “we only ever joined a Common Market, but it’s turned into something very different and no-one in authority down in London ever asked us whether that is what we wanted” is actually probably the closest to capturing their reasons for voting “leave”.

One can’t now suddenly start denouncing such people as Quisling closet remainers who do not subscribe to the “only true path” Brexit. Let alone insist on public self-criticism from several senior politicians on the Right who themselves, within the last few years, have publicly espoused these views, and praised the Norwegian and Swiss models, the health of their democracies and their prosperity.

To be clear, this is not an argument for an EEA model as opposed to the current proposed deal. This is not the place or time to rehearse the arguments either for or against any single version of Brexit.

It is perhaps the place to deplore the way in which the substance of all the models is constantly distorted by those who seem to not understand them – opponents and proponents – and then have given them a few days’ thought – in a panic.

But the real objection here is to the style of argument espoused both by the pro “no deal” Right and by Downing Street which says that no other model but their own is a potentially legitimate interpretation of the Will of the People – which evidently only they can properly discern.

Both fervent leavers and fervent remainers as well as No 10 seem now to seek to delegitimise a priori every version of the world they don’t support.

As for the Prime Minister’s proposed model, the entire EU knows that where we have now reached derives from her putting the ending of free movement of people well above all other objectives, and privileging as near frictionless trade in goods as she can get over the interests of UK services sectors.

The EU are no doubt unsurprised by the former but surprised – sometimes gleefully by the latter, as it seems to point precisely to a deal skewed in their favour.

The UK has essentially sacrificed all ambition on services sectors in return for ending free movement, sold the latter as a boon (when amongst other things, it clearly diminishes the value of a UK passport), and presented the former as a regaining of sovereignty, when it guarantees a major loss of market access in much our largest export market.

Well, by all means argue for it. I fully accept that control of borders – albeit with much confusion about the bit we already have control over, but year after year fail, under this Government, to achieve any control of – was a central referendum issue.

But don’t argue it’s the only feasible Brexit. Or that it’s an economically rational one.

Of course the EU side will now back the Prime Minister in saying it is. They have done a great deal for themselves and they want it to stick. Who can blame them? It’s in their own interests after all.