The Brexit dance is not impressing the judges

Big announcements in Brussels tend to be talked of in choreographic terms, so it helps to imagine today's events as the diplomatic equivalent of a Schiaparelli-pink Ann Widdecombe doing the tango in a harness.

This to take nothing away from the choreographers. Each cock-up had clearly been fastidiously planned. Each protracted delay, each contradicting statement, each cancelled meeting, each leaked detail, each tweet building to a shitshow so richly layered as to almost encapsulate Brexit itself in wondrous microcosmographia.

This, by the way, is meant to be the easy bit. Phase one: the citizens’ rights, the divorce bill and the Irish border; questions on which agreement is there to be found, middle ground to be reached, before moving on to the more sensitive subject of trade.

This was meant to be the easy dance, but Theresa May is discovering that even the simple steps are difficult when you've accidentally bazuka’d yourself in the foot, via the means of a needless general election.

Now, what do you know? It turns out that, if you’ve got an already fiendishly complex Irish border riddle to solve, it becomes that much harder if your Government exists with the permission of a slightly mad Northern Irish party whose approach to compromise is best understood through a repetitive three-word phrase that starts and ends with "never".

The easy bit, it seems, is too hard. The middle ground does not exist. Ireland and the EU won’t allow a hard border to be established between the Republic and the North, and the best solution it can find is to all but keep Northern Ireland within the EU customs union after the UK leaves it. The North, via its Conservative puppet masters, the DUP, won’t tolerate any difference in status between itself and the mainland, and it just about has the capacity to bring down Theresa May’s Government if it has to.

Leaked documents appeared, intimating the UK had agreed to “draft guidelines” that would ensure “no regulatory divergence” between Northern Ireland and the EU. In other words, it would continue to obey the EU’s rules after the rest of the UK became free to ignore them.

In magnificent symmetry, just as the DUP leader Arlene Foster appeared on the TV saying that Northern Ireland would not accept its own tailor-made soft Brexit, Nicola Sturgeon and Sadiq Khan began demanding soft Brexit for London and Scotland.

Theresa May’s “lunch” with Jean-Claude Juncker had to be paused while the two women held presumably rather heated phone discussions. The Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar’s planned press conference was delayed by three hours. And finally, May and Juncker shuffled onto a stage in Brussels to announce, in around ninety seconds, that no deal had been done.

For most of Monday, this column twitched nervously beneath the deliberately suggestive opening line of “So, Brexit phase one. How was it for you?” and expected to give a short summary of how absolutely everything in what was meant to be the easy bit had gone pretty spectacularly wrong.

That it has ended with no one fully sure whether or not it has ended, and with deep dissatisfaction bordering on resentment all round, is nothing if not fitting.

To take the stock phrase of Brexit’s least egregious interlocutor, Michael Gove, this ever-ongoing process is meant to be about “taking back control of our money, our laws and our borders”.

With the easy bit done, having taken back control of our money, we are paying around £60bn for membership of a golf club in which no one will speak to us and we’re barely allowed on the course.

Having taken back our laws, the European Court of Justice will all bit continue to oversee the rights of EU citizens living in the UK. This might sound arcane, but it is this more than anything else that has driven the fruitcakes and loonies (copyright David Cameron) that have pushed Brexit from the start.

And, having taken back control of our borders, it was meant to say, we have ripped apart decades of painstaking lifesaving diplomacy over the border with Ireland. That last bit, it seems, will have to wait for another day. Indeed “work is ongoing”, and both May and Juncker hope to have a second announcement to make in the coming days.

Then we shall move in to the “careful choreography” of phase two: trade talks. For that, think less Ann Widdecombe and more live on-air tea-bagging from Ed Balls – and the UK is very much the Katya Jones in that partnership.