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.