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Result of the stage one talks could be a more gradual Brexit

Shake on it: Theresa May and European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker in Brussels last week: Reuters
Shake on it: Theresa May and European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker in Brussels last week: Reuters

Confused by why the Brexit negotiations are a disaster one minute and a done deal, with participants tweeting their triumph, the next? Baffled by what Remainers really want — a new referendum, a softer Brexit or just a bad outcome to prove Leave wrong? Wondering if the EU has started to fathom what dealings with the UK might look like when the scolding is over? You’re on the right track. The film revival of Murder on the Orient Express has a convoluted plot in which all you really need to know is that they all did it. Brexitology, at the end of 2017, is also both complicated and getting simpler.

One of the main mistakes of broadcasters is to expect debate to reflect only the opinions of either full-on Brexiteers or diehard Remainers. Many civilians felt more conflicted than that ever suggested. And December 2017 is not the same as June 2016.

Today’s tribes range from reluctant Remainers, anxious about the economic impact of leaving the EU but allergic to its chilly arrogance towards any state that wants to leave it, to those who feel proud of the Leave vote for doling out a shock to a complacent Establishment but who get the jitters when they contemplate downward growth curves and lost jobs or fear cumbersome customs problems.

Since we’re in a metropolis that has fared well by being diverse and embracing the wider world we should note that the response is cultural, as much as it is about Office for Budget Responsibility projections or what bankers would like to happen. When Theresa May wrote (albeit belatedly) in this paper that she actively wanted EU citizens to feel at ease staying in a post-Brexit Britain she had finally grasped the worry that leaving is seen as a departure from valued cultural norms or openness, as well as a succession of deals on market access.

What have we learned from the febrile activity of a decisive political December? First, a point that No 10 does not much want to highlight but which is politically significant. Namely, that a no-deal arrangement or departure without a long transition (the creed of hard Brexiteers and dread of Remainers) is unlikely to be the end result.

The most likely result of the first stage of the talks is a softer and more gradual Brexit. The longer Britain is at the negotiating table, the less likely a collapse of those talks is. This is precisely why Nigel Farage was so quick to rail against it. A slow-cooked Brexit might look tortuous, feature more late-night crises, tantrums, DUP stand-offs, EU working lunches that don’t work well and officials in Whitehall huffing that everyone involved is useless, with the exception of themselves, but any momentum matters. And, crucially, it leaves those who were considering a Eurosceptic challenge to the Prime Minister flummoxed.

May is not a first-grade PM but she is not proving too bad at hanging on to her job in circumstances when she could easily have lost it. This reflects divisions on the Right of the party about what kind of Brexit they will pursue as an alternative.

Exhibit one is Michael Gove — a pivotal figure and a sort of trans-Tory. A biological Eurosceptic with a long history as a Leaver, he now welcomes the early stage EU-deal as a “personal” triumph for May, which sounds more like someone who expected to inhabit the “reasonable sceptic” end of Cabinet rather than a revolutionary.

Exhibit two is Boris Johnson, who has been manoeuvred by Philip Hammond and May into a corner of the chessboard where his resistance to an EU deal is couched in arcane phrasings about the implications of “regulatory alignment” to allow trade to flow across the border between Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic. For those concerned with lessening the reach of the European Court of Justice, the talks have essentially downgraded its ability to adjudicate on the details of Brexit (a win for the Government which it is sensible enough not to crow about).

Today’s Brexit tribes range from reluctant Remainers to those who feel proud of the Leave vote but get the jitters about lost jobs

Anne McElvoy

One vital lesson of the Tory wars over Europe in the early Nineties is that technical arguments are often less important than how the clans group and divide. John Major got into trouble because warring Eurosceptics agreed to gang up on him, though their cases often varied. Now the implacable Eurosceptic block in Parliament looks far less like a united force than it did straight after Brexit. It has no natural leader (unease about Boris not having abated in his time as Foreign Secretary), while veterans (Iain Duncan Smith, John Redwood) look and sound like throwbacks. Tellingly, when the hardliner Philip Davies launched an attack at May’s leadership last week, support was tepid and even many instinctive soulmates told me that the assault in the middle of tussles with Brussels was poor timing.

Two days of Commons debate and voting on the EU withdrawal bill from today are unlikely to be smooth but at least No 10 has started with a compromise on the absurdly sweeping “Henry VIII” powers and will most likely accord MPs more power to monitor those laws which will be repatriated from the EU.

After a lot of dither, the Government is moving close to being able to answer the question it has goldfished about for a year: what sort of Brexit does it fundamentally want? Now, a Canadian-style deal looks closest to hand, with the key argument being the number of “pluses” that can feasibly be attached.

It would be a stretch to say that this amounts to blazing clarity, let alone guaranteed success. But a Government in which Brexiteers and Remainers can break bread together with any constructive feeling has been a long time coming. It could yet melt as fast as the London snowfall. But for the first time this week, the Prime Minister looked just a bit happy in the job.

Anne McElvoy is senior editor at The Economist