Emmanuel Macron might be teasing us about Brexit, but it shows he's willing to negotiate

There is a danger in over-interpreting a single sentence in someone’s second language, but Emmanuel Macron’s words to Andrew Marr, in a BBC interview to be broadcast in full on Sunday morning, seem significant.

He said: “You cannot by definition have full access to the single market if you don’t tick the box.” That wasn’t the important bit, although it brought all the pedants out like a rash, demanding to know if the President of France knows the difference between access to the single market – even North Korea has access to the single market – and membership of it.

He meant full membership of the single market, and went on to set out the boxes that needed to be ticked: budget contributions, the four freedoms (including free movement of people) and the jurisdiction of the European Court.

The significant sentence was the next one: “As soon as you decide not to join these preconditions it’s not full access, so it’s something perhaps between this full access and a trade agreement.”

Previously, the EU negotiating position was that Britain could be either Norway – in the single market but out of the EU’s decision-making – or Canada – out of the single market, a “third country” with no privileges. Theresa May argued that we could have a “deep and special partnership” in between those two extremes, because we will start off by being fully aligned with the single market, and so some of that status should continue.

Now Macron, asked by Marr if “there will be a bespoke, special solution for Britain”, said: “Sure.”

Of course, this could mean a lot or a little. Macron stressed that there would be a price to pay for a deal. And he had said at the news conference with May on Thursday, that the single market – le marché unique – must be preserved. “There cannot be differentiated access to the single market, of which financial services are a part.”

That seemed to put paid to the idea of a free trade deal in services, which is the main “plus” of the “Canada plus plus plus” that David Davis, the Brexit Secretary, wants to agree.

So perhaps all Macron was doing was being polite to his host before adopting a hard line in the next stage of talks, as Paris tries to poach a chunk of the City of London’s business. But his words do suggest a willingness to negotiate, and that is all May needs. As the Brexit talks proceed, we are heading for a landing zone somewhere between Canada and Norway.

That may not be a wonderful outcome. Some Remainers won’t like it because we’ll be out, and some Leavers won’t like it because we will still be following all kinds of EU rules and standards. But it wouldn’t be the “no deal” apocalypse of Remainer nightmares; and it wouldn’t be Brexino, Brexit In Name Only, that is feared by Leavers. It would be a mediocre Brexit, and a fitting monument to Theresa May’s premiership.

It was Nick Boles, the Conservative MP for Grantham and a switcher from Boris Johnson to Michael Gove in the post-referendum Tory leadership contest, who spoke for the nation this week: “There is a timidity and lack of ambition about Mrs May’s Government which means it constantly disappoints.” He cited the failure to challenge the release of taxi rapist John Worboys, the housing crisis and the problem of NHS funding but no doubt by the end of the year it will apply to Brexit too. “Time to raise your game, Prime Minister,” he declared.

I don’t know a single Tory MP who thinks she can. The trouble is that the one time she was persuaded not to be timid, and to call an election, it worked out badly. But if she can deliver a mediocre Brexit, as opposed to a disastrous one, she will have done her best by her lights.

At a time when achieving anything in government seems hard – from the US shutdown to the British legal tangle over Worboys and the deep problems of housing and NHS funding – it may be that a non-disastrous Brexit is the best we can hope for.