Been stewing on Boris' latest self-serving cobblers yesterday, and what it tells us about the wider Brexit 'debate'...
Ever since the result something rather remarkable has become so embedded in the Brexit process and coverage that we don't even comment on it any more. It is the near complete failure to recognise there is a counter-party in these negotiations.
Almost everything - and in the case of Boris and the Hard Brexiteers absolutely everything - is seen through the frame of what can the UK get/do/achieve. There is not the faintest recognition there is another party (or to be precise 27 parties) that are central to the whole thing
This is utterly antithetical to how effective modern negotiation and diplomacy works. It is almost Trumpian in its disregard for the complexity involved.
An informative example is the Paris Agreement. It is not perfect by any means, but it was one of the most effective multi-lateral negotiations in history, requiring huge compromise and recognition of shared interest by over 190 parties.
It also had a fantastic base line to compare and contrast against provided by the failure of the Copenhagen Summit in 2009.
How was Paris achieved where Copenhagen failed? There are many, many reasons, but one critical one was the ability of the key players to build trust and understand their partners' goals, red lines, and domestic pressures.
The US-China charm offensive was so long-running and genuine the lead negotiators are said to have ended up as good friends.
They got to a place where China recognised the US could not and would not accept any avenue for compensation and needed an agreement with a high degree of universality. The US swallowed the fact binding targets for China were out.
At the same time the EU, island states and some of the key developing nations reached out to each other in recognition that they had a mutual interest in seeking a more ambitious deal.
Funding commitments were made in pursuit of building trust and the full gamut of diplomacy was mobilised to convince any hold outs that an imperfect agreement was better than no deal.
One of the many worrying aspects of the Brexit negotiations is that 2 years in there is hardly any sign of any of this. In fact we are getting the precise opposite. Mutual antipathy and a breakdown of trust (which is much more reminiscent of the build up to the Copenhagen Summit)
Of course, there are big differences between Paris and the Brexit talks. For a start any Brexit deal will have to be legally binding, making it much harder to deliver the trust-based approach that eventually unlocked the Paris Agreement.
But the basics of trying to understand what the other party needs has barely featured in the coverage and wider political debate (we can but hope it is going on behind closed doors)
What does the EU want and need? Minimal economic disruption, the continued coherence of the single market, lowest possible risk of others leaving the bloc, and lowest possible risk of a competitor undercutting it on standards, taxes, etc.
Whatever you think of the EU (and it has made mistakes and arguably should do more to understand UK's needs) these are completely rational and predictable red lines.
The UK could have started by engaging with them (and the onus is on us to engage first as the party that needs a deal most), by focusing first on areas like energy and climate where there is clear agreement, by building trust at every turn.
Then, when it came for the tough conversations about migration and the few areas where the UK may want to diverge, there would be goodwill to draw on. That's how Paris delivered. That's how most effective negotiations deliver.
Instead UK started with red lines without slightest thought of how they were always going to be completely incompatible with the kind of trade deal the government said it wanted. Not slightly incompatible positions that could be shifted, but a perfect recipe for deadlock.
And now, as all this finally dawns on the government and economic disaster looms, Boris is still trying to defend those red lines under the absurdist assumption that because we are British we can completely ignore the fact that there are other parties to consider.
In short, unless there is a very different approach and atmosphere behind the scenes, everything points to these talks ending up much more like Copenhagen than Paris. Which is one of many reasons why I'm starting to get The Fear again.
Basically this
