Angela Merkel is Theresa May’s new best friend – but how long will it last?

Angela Merkel, the German Chancellor, sounded very different from Michel Barnier, the EU negotiator, in her news conference with Theresa May this afternoon. Where Barnier had a week ago insisted that Britain must either be subject to all EU laws or be treated like any other country in the world, Merkel sounded more open to some kind of half-way status between full EU membership and the outer darkness.

She was asked if what the British wanted was “cherry picking” and rejected the phrase. She accepted May’s argument that Britain would be different from other countries after we leave because we start from a situation of being so closely aligned with the EU.

The relationship would not be as close it is now, Merkel said, but “I think we can find” that compromise position.

Of course, these are just words, but if they are any guide to how the negotiations will go they suggest a willingness “to find common ground”, as Merkel put it, which was rather different from Barnier’s take-it-or-leave-it language.

Merkel did repeat, more gently, some of Barnier’s pre-negotiation attempt to play games with the other side’s psychology. Asked if she were frustrated by the British Government’s failure to be clear about what it wants and the continued divisions in the Cabinet, she said: “I’m not frustrated, I’m just curious.” Both sides were in a process of learning, and “we sometimes don’t know how our opposite number is seeing things”. That is the politest way yet of expressing the common German view that we British must be out of our minds.

But it was the willingness to do a deal that was the most important theme of a news conference that was otherwise devoted to the repetition of platitudes. They were so dull that we had to occupy ourselves by noting the new variations on “deep and special” to describe the partnership with the EU that Theresa May is seeking. Today she wanted a “bold and ambitious” partnership and then a “comprehensive and ambitious” one.

Almost the only colour in a careful and brief session, which Merkel tried to bring to a close forgetting that she hadn’t taken a second question from the German media, was provided by Theresa May’s Wikipedia reference to the “proud history” of Anglo-German trade in the form of the 12th-century Hanseatic League.

We hoped for more but instead were straight into what May insisted on calling the “time-limited implementation period” – what everyone else calls the transition period – that will follow Brexit and about which talks will begin on Monday.

After the talks on the transition period comes the most important part of the negotiation, about the terms of the future partnership. Merkel said there was more than a “single bone of contention” between the UK and the EU on that; “it is a very complex matter”.

But she sounded as if she wanted to do a deal. The trouble is that David Cameron thought she was an ally in renegotiating the terms of our EU membership before the referendum, and she turned out to be less flexible – or more committed to the European ideal, to put it more politely – than he had hoped.