The Brexit negotiations are an irrelevant sideshow

So far the Government has been acting as if the Brexit negotiations stand a chance of success and that everything hinges on how we approach the discussions and the skilfulness and tact of our negotiators. Only in the last day or so has it reluctantly contemplated the possibility of failure. They could have learnt a lot from reading the account of our chief negotiator in the 1970s, Sir Con O’Neill. He led the negotiations to join the EU from 1970 to 1972 and wrote his account –Britain’s Entry into the European Community: Report on the Negotiations of 1970-1972 – immediately after discussions finished.

O’Neill concluded that all that mattered in the end was the political imperatives. The UK wanted to join, previously de Gaulle had blocked us, and now community leaders wanted us in. He wrote that ‘in a certain sense the whole of our long negotiations were peripheral, accidental and secondary’.