This isn't a negotiation. It's a performance for a domestic audience, designed to hold a party together at a general election. And in those two sentences is the entire history of the Brexit process since 2016.
From the outset, both frontbenches have treated Brexit as a problem of internal party management, rather than as the most complex and high stakes policy problem since 1945. The result has been a catastrophic failure of British statecraft.
The two main parties have spent three years looking *inward* at what they could sell to their members, not *outward* at what they could achieve with their partners. And so, at the Tory party conference, diplomacy collapses into that most British of artforms: the Christmas panto.
