Whether it's unhinged Brexiteers or the EU lying about Theresa May's dinner leaks, we know the final outcome

There were those who said a 13th series of The Apprentice could be a series or 10 too many, but the true persevering genius of the BBC finally reveals itself once you come to realise the show simply had to make it through to 2017 to answer its true calling as a weekly Brexit negotiation live metaphor.

As far back as, ooh a decade or so ago, it was reasonable to start wondering whether you hadn’t perhaps seen enough of, say, a gang of egotistical imbeciles failing to sell breeze blocks of cash-and-carry mild cheddar to French gourmands at a Parisian farmers’ market. Or, to pluck another entirely random example from what just so happens to have been the most recently broadcast episode, not managing to convince a leading department store that what’s missing from its shelves is a £750 smart robot not quite smart enough to remember its own name.

But, once your eyes have shifted to view this nano-brained, witless WTFgasm through the prism of the much larger nano-brained, witless WTFgasm currently facing the nation, the process becomes extraordinarily illuminating.

Scaled down to meet the hour-long episode timeframe, we’re 20 minutes into the Brexit negotiations now. The project manager’s brainstorming session ended with the voters taking a Claude-style glance at the camera, its head and jowls suddenly united in disapproving tremolando. Mere minutes ago, witless men with towering opinions of themselves were shouting things like, “We’re gonna smash it! We’re gonna smash it!” but now someone’s accidentally dropped the anthrax in the artisanal sausage machine, and any vague attempt at winning the task has been replaced by increasingly frantic and unhinged attempts at pre-apportioning blame for failure.

We turn then to the “leak” of the latest disastrous dinner between Theresa May and Jean-Claude Juncker.

On the day in which the BBC reports news of a Cambridge-based dog with its head stuck in a wall, it is as good a time as any to remind oneself of that sacred dog/man/bite triptych of newsworthiness. For, as anyone who has dined with Theresa May knows, a disastrous dinner with Theresa May is not news. Indeed polite veterans of such traumatic occasions have been known to remark that, “By the end even the cutlery was glancing at the door.” An un-disastrous dinner with Theresa May – that would be news.

Back to the topic at hand. News of this disastrous occasion, after which Jean-Claude Juncker is understood to have told colleagues our Prime Minister is “sleep-deprived” and “begging for help”, has again appeared in the German press. The early rounds of finger-pointing have led with fingers pointed at Juncker wunderkind Martin Selmayr, on account him being a) the only German at the dinner and b) almost certainly having done it last time.

Chief among the finger-pointers was Nick Timothy who, not at all sad that for some reason he doesn’t get to go to these dinners anymore, immediately blamed Selmayr. “After constructive Council meeting, Selmayr does this. Reminder that some in Brussels want no deal or a punitive one,” he wrote on his newly reactivated Twitter account.

But, in scenes sadly transposed to Twitter rather than their natural home in a Brentwood greasy spoon, stirring cold tea and “taking responsibility for failure” by loudly listing the reasons none of it is your fault, Selmayr struck back. “I deny that 1/ we leaked this; 2/ Juncker ever said this; 3 /we are punitive on Brexit. It’s an attempt to frame EU side and to undermine talks,” he wrote.

That the most important question facing the UK in generations should have descended to whoever-smelt-it-dealt-it territory should come as no surprise. Whether the one who denied it really did supply it cannot be ruled out. Who’s coming back into the boardroom is not immediately clear, but you won’t necessarily need a half-hour sit down with Adrian Chiles over on BBC Two to work out someone somewhere is not telling the whole truth.

If immediate reaction is to be believed, this accusation and counter-accusation is not evidence of mere incompetence but a deep cover operation. It has even been suggested it could be Timothy himself, leaking to the German press, framing the man who was once considered his heavyweight Brexit sparring partner, before he accidentally punched himself in the face and knocked himself out on the way to the ring.

Far-fetched of course, but don’t forget that the last time this happened, Theresa May took it as pretext to give a truly demented speech, doubtless written by Timothy, blaming the EU for “interfering in our election”. And given what we have since come to know about the sheer weight of Timothy’s strategic genius, it would be naive to assume such political fart-lighting pyrotechnics on a self-hospitalisation scale are entirely beyond him.

Intrigue aside, there is also the poor German newspaper-buying public to consider. How many euros should anyone be expected to pay to discover Theresa May is desperate, depressed and begging for help? There they are, pausing over their weisswurst to learn that Emmanuel Macron and Angela Merkel are of the view that Brexit is “unwanted” and that it is not up to them to “solve Britain’s problems”.

You’ve got to pity them really. That passes as news over there, does it? Over here we’ve got a dog with its head stuck in a wall. And don’t tell anyone, but I’ve heard the BBC have got him lined him up for series 14, once he’s finished negotiating Brexit of course.