Christopher Booker:

For months I have been predicting here that, sooner or later, the day would come when some very uncomfortable realities would start to intrude on the bubble of makebelieve in which our Government has been heading for our negotiations to withdraw from the EU. Last Wednesday, before the EU’s leaders gathered this weekend to proclaim their united response to Britain’s demands, the loudest alarm bell yet was sounded by Angela Merkel in a speech to the German parliament.

The British, she said, have simply been “wasting time” living in a cloud of “illusions”. For a start, she made clear, they cannot hope to begin discussing trade before they agree to meet that so-called “divorce bill”. This, she said, is “irreversible”. As I was pointing out last summer, it was always going to be top of the EU’s agenda that we must pay our share in all those ongoing financial commitments up to 2020 and beyond which our government has already legally signed up to.

Mrs Merkel then won cheers from the Bundestag by reminding them that, by deciding to leave the single market and the European Economic Area (EEA), Britain is choosing to become automatically what the EU classifies as a “third country”. This means we cannot possibly hope to enjoy anything like the ease of trading with the EU that we have now.

As again some of us have long been warning, this means we are choosing to exclude ourselves from the system which gives us unrestricted access to easily our largest export market, and the source of 30 per cent of our food. Up will go border controls on all our frontiers with the EU (including that in Northern Ireland). The days when 12,000 trucks a day could cross freely from Dover to Calais, and much else, will be over.

There is no way that any one-off “trade deal” of the kind Theresa May and her colleagues are imagining could get round any of this, and the practical implications of this for Britain are horrendous. That is precisely why some of us have long tried to point out that the only conceivably sensible way for us to leave the EU, wholly desirable though that is, would be to have remained in the EEA and to join Norway in the European Free Trade Area (Efta).

It is terrifying how deliberately our politicians, led by the “UltraBrexiteers” around Theresa May, have refused to consider what this could have given us: continued trading as we have now; exemption from most of the rulings of the European Court of Justice; freedom to negotiate our own trade deals with the outside world; even a unilateral right under the EEA agreement to exercise, in our national interest, some selective control over immigration from the EU.

But all this, by failing to do the necessary homework, the UltraBrexiteers have shut their eyes to. They have not begun to grasp the realities of what would be needed to achieve a properly workable disengagement from that system of government we have been part of and ruled by for 44 years.

They will shortly be brought up against all those hard realities to which they have remained oblivious, in ways far more unpleasant than they can yet imagine. That is what Sir Ivan Rogers was hinting at when he spoke of “ill-informed and muddled thinking” at the top of government, before he resigned last December as our top man in Brussels. And it is what Mrs Merkel means when she says that British ministers have so far just been wasting time in chasing “illusions”.

But how many of our own politicians over the next few weeks of election campaigning will be pointing any of this out; any more than we will hear it from the BBC and the rest of the media? For reasons long predictable, we are heading for some very nasty shocks and real trouble. The Brexit dream stage is over. Merkel’s chilling words last week were only the start of the new stage we are now so blindly drifting into.