May's Brexit proposals have been two years in the making. They were killed off in Brussels within eight minutes

The Brexit “negotiations” have always been best understood as the kind of negotiations that occur between a particularly irritating toddler and its wearied parent. So it came as a surprise to no one when on Friday morning Britain, having stood around doing not very much for two years, the car now almost fully loaded, finally decided that actually it did want to go to the toilet after all, it was met with a firm “no”.

You will know, traditionally, what happens next in such matters. The Brexit journey will not smell nice for anyone, but it will be Britain that suffers the most.

That, via a speech in Belfast, just over two years on from the referendum and with six meaningful weeks of negotiating time left, Theresa May finally put some concrete proposals to the EU and Michel Barnier immediately came out of his office in Brussels to reject them is, of course, laughable. Not least as the proposals that have taken two years for her government to “agree” on have only been “agreed” in the sense that her brexit secretary and foreign secretary didn’t agree with them, and so left the government – from which point on the “agreement” has disintegrated in plain sight.

Theresa May had flown to Belfast to show how much she cares about Northern Ireland, which normally might look generous but pales in comparison with last year’s present of just over a billion quid.

She had mysteriously forgotten her trusted giant plain white backdrop this time, which traditionally accompanies her on all Brexit set piece speeches, where it used to obliterate the view of wondrous Florentine churches, or the splendid halls of Lancaster and Mansion House in London.

And you could see why she uses it as, 20 seconds in, most of her audience appeared focussed instead on counting the buses driving over various bridges out the window behind her. Frankly, the Northern Irish people let themselves down. As talk switched between tariffs and customs and agrifoods and pesticides, it seemed inevitable that a passing chancer would seek immortality by leaping naked off the bridge into the river below, or at least park up a bus featuring some outrageous slogan like, say: “We send the EU £350m a week. Let’s spend it on the NHS instead.”

The details of the Irish question are, frankly, highly complex and highly boring.

Whoever would have known there would be complexities and difficulties, when a gaggle of populist chancers go round the country shouting about “taking back control of our borders”, win and then instantly rule out the possibility of actually having a border in the one place where a border would be needed.

Whoever could have foreseen that, the UK having spent most of the last two years threatening to withhold £40bn worth of outstanding debts to the European Union, the EU has some questions to ask over the UK’s bold new proposal of having the bloc let the UK collect its taxes for it.

It has taken Theresa May two years to build her sandcastle. It took Michel Barnier, in his Brussels press conference, around eight minutes to kick it down.

She will now, when she returns after the summer, have six weeks to build another one.

At the start of her Belfast speech, by the way, she referred to what she had said “outside 10 Downing Street” when she became prime minister, about how the Conservative party’s full name is the Conservative and Unionist Party, “and how important that word, Unionist, is to me”.

But there are some other words said by her outside 10 Downing Street about a year later, when she sought to consolidate her abysmal election campaign by rattling her sabre at Brussels, that suddenly feel more relevant, and which I quote here at length.

“This Brexit negotiation is central to everything,” she said then.

“If we don’t get the negotiation right, your economic security and prosperity will be put at risk and the opportunities you seek for your families will simply not happen.

“If we do not stand up and get this negotiation right we risk the secure and well-paid jobs we want for our children and our children’s children too.

“If we don’t get the negotiation right, if we let the bureaucrats of Brussels run over us, we will lose the chance to build a fairer society with real opportunity for all.”

How well do we think that’s going, exactly? Does it, maybe, kind of feel like that risk that was taken with our children and our children’s children’s futures might not be paying off?