1. It’s extraordinary how UK has ceded any advantage it could possibly have had in its negotiation with the EU from Day 1. First, by triggering Art 50 prematurely, before it had made ANY preparation or even decided its strategy or aims. Then, calling a GE wasting yet more time.
2. The timing of its triggering Art 50 was the thing that kept the UK, de facto, in charge of the process. It lit the fuse before even working out which way the exit was. And it has been on the back foot ever since and never recovered.
3. Incompetent, dithering, indecisive, squabbling, and poorly prepared, the UK has engaged in empty rhetoric, designed exclusively for a home audience, without ever making any concrete, realistic, or in any way detailed proposals, it has given the EU the initiative at every turn.
4. The UK went to the meeting to decide the timing and sequence of negotiations, to discuss an EU detailed draft, having published no counter-proposal on the timing and sequence of negotiations. Consequently, it whinged about minor stuff, moved some punctuation and folded.
5. The UK then went into the final phase of the first stage, again with absolutely no published detailed position. The EU drafted it, the UK signed it, because it is desperate to move on to transitional arrangements and trade deal.
6. The UK then enters the period for deciding transitional arrangement, with the EU publishing a 120-page legal document, memorialising its position, while the UK gov’t is having away-days to try and decide what it EVEN WANTS. Watch it now scrap for some minor victory, then fold.
7. And this is the pattern that will replicate in the trade deal. The UK will stare at its navel muttering how it’s all terribly unfair while the EU does the ACTUAL work required to hit its targets and realise its aims. No chance of a change of form without a change of personnel.
8. And instead of making our leaders walk over hot coals for their amateurish and cavalier attitude towards the biggest decision facing the country in two generations, but we celebrate their idiocy. We’re not being bullied, plotted against or victimised. We’re just not very good. 
