We might get somewhere with EU trade talks – but only if Boris Johnson sells defeat as victory

Ignore today’s shadow boxing: the only question that matters is whether Boris Johnson can dress up a retreat as a negotiating triumph. He has done it before, and there is still time, but the nervousness on both sides today was palpable.

Michel Barnier, the EU negotiator, and David Frost, his British counterpart, both put on a good show. Barnier said: “I simply do not understand why we are wasting valuable time.” Frost retorted that the EU side was holding things up by insisting the UK must accept its position on state aid and fisheries “before any further substantive work can be done in any other area of the negotiation”.

They traded semantics on the meaning of “Brexit means Brexit”, which Barnier quoted only slightly mockingly to say that we could not continue to enjoy the benefits of membership now that we have left. Frost retaliated by saying the EU was refusing to accept the “reality” of Brexit, with the British team accusing the EU side of “still insisting we must accept arrangements that are like the Common Fisheries Policy”, for example.

Time is now running out to draft, negotiate, check and sign off a long and complex legal text by the end of the year. The character of Frost – now Lord Frost – is key to how this deal will get done, if it is done.

Denis MacShane, the former Europe minister, has unearthed an interesting paper Frost wrote in 2015, before the Brexit referendum. In it, Frost argued that “two essential requirements for a successful negotiation” are firstly “having allies” and second “making what you want seem normal”. The allies are unclear, although we know EU leaders want a deal, but Frost has done a good job of explaining that Britain wants only what the EU has accepted in free trade agreements with other countries.

Frost was also the prime mover behind last year’s deal with Leo Varadkar, the Irish prime minister, which opened the way to a new withdrawal agreement, making Brexit possible. That deal basically meant Johnson putting a border down the Irish Sea between Northern Ireland and the rest of the UK, and denying that he had done it.

If some of that same creativity and skill at selling defeat as victory can be applied to the trade negotiations, Frost and Johnson should be able to make something work. The sticking point ought not to be difficult to finesse. What Barnier calls the “level playing field”, even when he is speaking in French, amounts to the EU wanting to prevent the UK from competing unfairly by using state subsidies to lower prices.

Most trade agreements ban unfair competition and create mechanisms to enforce the rules. The EU has already agreed that, in this case, the mechanism has to be separate from the European Court of Justice. So the trick ought to be to allow the EU to impose its state aid rules on the UK, while making it look as if the UK has decided of its own sovereign accord not to dish out state aid.

Which ought to come easily enough to a Conservative government that is against state subsidies in any case. This is complicated by Johnson’s populist economic interventionism, but he is nothing if not ideologically flexible.

The deal is there to be done but the UK desperately needs allies, preferably in the form of Angela Merkel and Emmanuel Macron, to get it done in time.