The question May’s Brexit deal critics must ask themselves

Brexit is an accident born of misunderstanding. One of the biggest miscalculations is about the EU and how it works. Troublingly, that misjudgement, embraced by both unwise Leavers and imprudent Remainers, could just lead Britain off a cliff, for the second time in three years.

I attended my first EU summit in 2001 and stopped counting the number of Council meetings, ECOFINs and other EU gatherings when the figure passed 50 some time early in the financial crisis. I’ve seen a lot of British politicians go to Brussels (and elsewhere, in those innocent days before the Belgians captured all council meetings for their capital) and pursue the British national interest, with varying degrees of success. One notion that came up time and time again in such dealings is this: if the EU could just understand the depth of British concern about a particular European issue, the other leaders at the council table would realise that they need to give more ground and go further to accommodate British wishes.

The most frequent exponents of this theory have been Conservative eurosceptics. Time and again, they’d howl with fury about British policy in Europe, explaining that if only [insert Prime Minister’s name here] had shown some real steel and told the EU that people in the UK (or at least in Parliament) were hopping mad and that unless they give Britain what it wanted, well, those people would get even angrier.

Indeed, under David Cameron it was sometimes argued by Tory sceptics that parliamentary rebellions over various bits of EU business were actually helpful to the PM, since they allowed him to go to Brussels and say, in terms, “you’ve got to help me out here because if you don’t my party will lynch me”.

That theory overlooks several inconvenient facts about the EU and the heads of other EU member states, the most important of which is this: that’s not how the EU works, how it’s ever worked or how it was ever meant to work.