The EU is pushing us towards ‘no deal’ but they, too, would pay a heavy price

As Chequers lies in tatters, the only coherent position on Brexit is now being made by Tory renegades

(or virtually non-existent) exit. That is to say, for an opening gambit in a one-way “negotiation” in which all the concessions will be from our side, and the fastidious Mr Barnier will emerge elegantly triumphant. This is the actual choice, as Philip Hammond, in his inimitable way, has helped to clarify: no deal, his Treasury team assures him, would be so fiscally ruinous and socially catastrophic that anything that the EU offers (under the heading of a radically revised “Chequers”) would be preferable.

So let’s all agree that “Chequers” is code for starting-position-not-tobe-taken-literally – because far from being the only possible alternative to “no deal”, it is not, in its existing form, even in the running as far as official EU negotiators are concerned.

This brings us to last week’s longawaited technical guidance papers offering advice to concerned sectors of the economy on what to do when the bomb goes off – the ones Mr Hammond then deliberately set out to blow out of the water. These seemed to consist partly of silly warnings about trivia (the EU apparently controls the design of labels on organic food: who knew?) to stupefyingly boring instructions about customs paperwork that managed to be both tediously officious and perversely vague. All of this was peppered with words like “might”, “may” and “could”, which is tantamount to saying: “Nobody actually knows what is going to be required because we haven’t discussed anything yet.”

We haven’t broached any of it because we are not yet at the point of declaring that there is no deal and we are walking away. It is only at that point that we will discover just how much punishment the EU is prepared to inflict on its own member states in the pursuit of vengeance and, thus, how much potential damage we must be prepared for.

The “mights” and “mays” and “coulds” that were scattered throughout these documents were a clue to what most Brexiteers believe to be the political truth of this game: that, in the end, the strutting peacocks on the EU Commission will have to answer to the heads of member states, many of whom are in peculiarly vulnerable positions at home. Because, as everybody knows, the stringency of the conditions laid down for our relations will have a direct and precisely proportional impact on the economies of the member states and their elected leaders. Vengeance will come at a price.

Meanwhile, there seems to be some confusion about the Government’s intention in issuing these technical advisory papers. Were they designed to reassure the general public (to whom they were supposedly not addressed) that everything will be fine even in the event of a no-deal exit? That was clearly the ostensible aim, since Dominic Raab couched his announcements in the most soothing possible terms: folks at home will hardly notice the difference between Brexit minus one day and Brexit plus one day, etc.

But there is an alternative theory: that all the complex and occasionally alarming detail (expats won’t get access to their pensions!; credit card transactions will be more expensive!) would cause the credulous hordes to embrace Mrs May’s Chequers gambit in terror.

Which was it? Who knows? The Government’s intentions seem so self-contradictory and inconsistent

at telegraph.co.uk/ opinion that it is impossible to judge. If this bizarre package of myriad advice (with a promise of more to come) was devised to provide certainty to businesses needing to make concrete plans, it was largely a failure. If it was meant to lessen the anxiety (and the anger) of all those ordinary people who just want the Government to “get on with it”, it may well have had a perverse effect.

What became alarmingly clear in all that copious detail was just how entangled we have become in the EU bureaucratic system. Startling degrees of European law and regulation now dominate the running of almost every area of our lives. Message to Leave voters: it was much worse than you thought. And to Remainers: were you aware that we were in this deep?

In the leaderless vacuum that is now the Tory party, the only coherent position – for a Canada-plus free trade agreement – is having to be made by renegades, even though it was once, in David Davis’s time, thought to be a respectable proposition in official Government circles. Clearly the free traders lost the power struggle with the Treasury, which doesn’t believe in free anything because it is manned by control freaks.

So the UK appears to be left with the tattered banner of Chequers – or the apocalypse of no deal. Except that this is all hokum. Nobody knows how a no-deal ending would play out. The lack of a comprehensive free trade agreement would not prevent informal border arrangements, bilateral understandings or back-channel fixes. These will take their own course, because they must. The elected governments of Europe are not going to pauperise their own populations for the sake of ideological vanity.

Was the ‘no-deal’ guidance issued to reassure the public, or to cause the credulous hordes to embrace Chequers?