Bad idea Brexit has turned into a disaster

So that’s it then, is it? Theresa May has concluded a Brexit deal that channels Paul Daniels – the TV magician from the 1980s – whose catchphrase was “you’ll like this… not a lot, but you’ll like it!”

After a long and bitter campaign marked by anti-immigrant sentiment, an ill-thought-out referendum was won on a knife-edge by Leave, opening the way to two years of shambolic negotiations and a draft deal that, if approved at Westminster, will leave us with less access to the European market than we have now as well as restrictions on our ability to conclude third country trade deals and no power to influence future EU decisions.

But of course, as the pantomime season gets underway, there is the expectation that Parliament will reject the offer, resulting in a chaotic No Deal departure supported only by Nigel Farage, the English Defence League and the sinister-sounding but actually ludicrous European Research Group of Tory MPs.

We could have agreed to refer the settlement back to the British people, knowing now what we didn’t know then. But that would have meant ignoring the will of 51.9 per cent of the 72 per cent of those who voted in the referendum believing that they were going to get £350 million pounds a week back from Brussels to spend on the NHS. It would also require Jeremy Corbyn to admit that Brexit was about more than getting his feet under the PM’s desk at Number 10.

Alternatively, we could have secured membership of the European Economic Area and European Free Trade Association, giving us full access to the Single Market and rights of consultation in respect of regulations and trade – the so-called Norway option. Except that this would have meant we were still bound by club rules. So that was right out.

Or we could have opened the negotiations with Europe with an adult understanding of what was possible and what was not, including an acknowledgment of the complexity of the Irish border issue. We could have foreseen the dogged determination of the 27 not to be divided and the fact that German industry was never going to to sacrifice the integrity of the Single Market simply to safeguard car sales in the UK. We could have properly explored the prospect of pandemonium at Dover and accepted the reality that we would not be permitted to cherry-pick what we wanted from Europe while ditching the rest.

The problem was, we didn’t know what we were doing. We didn’t even know what we wanted. At every stage in what was a wearisome process, we got it hopelessly wrong.

Right at the last moment –  a cherry picked not by us but by Spain – we even set up the possible loss of Gibraltar as a member of the British family, giving Madrid the right of veto over the Rock’s future relationship with both it and the EU.

In short, a bravura performance  – if, that is, the point of the ramshackle production had been to demonstrate the sheer incompetence of the British government and the precipitate nature of the UK’s loss of status and dignity.

How proud do you feel today? In 2015, Britain boasted the fastest-growing economy in both Europe and the G7. We were America’s – and Japan’s – bridge to the EU. Our diplomats were respected. We had successfully negotiated opt-outs from the single currency and the Schengen agreement on open borders. Every year we were paid a 30 per cent rebate of our contribution to the community budget. Uniquely, we were even given an assurance that we would not in future be bound by the goal of Ever Closer Union.

It was already Brexit Lite. But it was not enough. Leavers wanted more – much more. In particular, they wanted the right to deny EU citizens the right to live and work in the UK. They were sick and tired of hearing Polish spoken in our high streets. They were not prepared to be undercut in the unskilled labour market by Romanians and Bulgarians. They wanted to pick their own fruit … except, of course, that they didn’t.

Only later, when it was pointed out that immigrants were vital to the NHS, that migrant labourers tended to pay more tax than the rest of us and that most truck drivers working long hours delivering British exports came from Eastern Europe, not eastern England, did they ease up on the abuse. They – or at any rate their leaders – fell back then on the old tropes of unelected bureaucrats in Brussels and the “invidious” role of the European Court of Justice.

The fact that Britain had its own Commissioner, its own judge in the ECJ, its own army of fonctionnaires and its own MEPs, including the feckless Farage, and that the British prime minister was one of the most senior members of the European Council, counted for nothing. The whole thing was a stitch-up by Germany and France. They wanted out and they wanted out now – on purely British terms.

So how did that work out?

Theresa May’s settlement is not the worst outcome that we could have been faced with. That dismal distinction is more likely to fall to whatever is left after MPs have voted on the deal in the lead-up to Christmas. All that can safely be said is that Britain over the course of the next decade, and possibly for a lot longer than that, will be poorer and less influential in the world than it is now.

When the turmoil that will inevitably attend our departure eventually subsides, the autopsy will be brutal. What was it all about? Who ever thought it was a good idea? And why didn’t we understand what was involved and how difficult it would be to throw off 45 years of intimate association? Historians will have a field day.