The EU has shown that it wants Britain as a subject, not an ally

There are only three ‘correct’ responses to Brexit in Brussels: denial, fury or complete contempt

Imagine that the EU were a wholly rational actor. I know, I know, but bear with me. European leaders keep saying that Brexit will be awful, and that their dearest wish is for Britain to change its mind. A hundred MEPs have written an open letter asking us to stay, and a number of distinguished Germans, including all the main party leaders, have done the same thing. OK, then. If they’d like us to stay, what would be their most logical course of action?

The answer is obvious. As George Soros, who has given money to the anti-Brexit campaign, puts it, “The EU needs to transform itself into an association which nations like Britain would want to join.” Tony Blair believes that Brexit could be reversed if only there were “comprehensive” reform in the EU that would address the “genuine underlying grievances” that voters had about immigration and the loss of sovereignty.

Have EU leaders listened to such voices? Have they thought about offering Britain a looser relationship – what Jacques Delors, prior to the referendum, called “associate membership”? Au contraire, as we Old Brussels Hands say. Instead, they have plunged ahead with deeper union, rushing to create a European army and a European taxation system.

Eurocrats may want Britain to stay, but only on their terms. Neither of the two open letters hints at the prospect of a less-integrationist deal. Instead, the Germans tell us that they will miss our pubs (good news, meine Freunde

– you’ll still be welcome in them after we leave), while the MEPs inform us that Brexit will be a “disaster” and instruct us to change our minds.

You might argue that the EU cannot be seen to offer a better deal to a country that has voted to withdraw. But no one in Brussels sees pulling out of common policies as a better deal. EU leaders might plausibly have reacted to the referendum by saying, “OK, if you don’t want to be part of a united Europe, let’s work out a looser arrangement. How about staying in the common market but opting out of the political stuff – foreign policy, criminal justice, common citizenship, all that? We’d call that a worse deal than you have now, but if you eccentric islanders want to call it a better deal, fine, call it what you like.”

One MEP, a former president of the Federation of German Industries called Hans-Olaf Henkel, suggested such a response, but he was howled down. In Brussels, there are only three correct responses to Brexit: denial (“they’ll come to their senses”); fury (“they were lied to, the vote was stolen”); and contempt (“the arrogant fools deserve what’s coming to them”). The thing no one is allowed to do is to ask why Britain voted Leave, or whether Eurocrats might have behaved differently to make the EU more popular.

Now, no organisation is obliged to change its rules to suit one member. The EU is perfectly within its rights to say, “We aim to become a country called Europe, and you can take it or leave it”. But, in choosing to stick to that line, it made Brexit inevitable. Knowing that the UK might soon hold a referendum, EU leaders voted by 26 to two (Hungary and Britain) to appoint Jean-Claude Juncker as President of the European Commission – a man who wants a European army and police force, a common social security system, an EU seat at the UN and all the paraphernalia of statehood. Even when they knew that Britain was months away from a vote, EU leaders wouldn’t let David Cameron recover a single power.

To repeat, I’m not denying the right of the EU27 to pursue whatever policies they wish. All I’m doing is showing why Brexit was the inescapable result of a difference in outlook between a British public attached to parliamentary sovereignty and a Brussels system that views the nation-state as passé. The Leave vote was not an accidental spasm. It was not a one-off reaction to the migration crisis in the Mediterranean. It was not, as the recent Channel 4 dramatisation suggested, a fluke based on online advertising. It was a tempest that had been brewing since at least the Maastricht debates, slow to make head, but sure to hold.

That, ultimately, is what makes talk of a second referendum so silly. The EU is not going to be accommodating. It won’t pretend to meet Britain half way. The only thing achieved by talk of a second poll, or of cancelling Article 50, or of taking “no deal” off the table, is to encourage Brussels to toughen its line.

Donald Tusk responded to last week’s Commons vote by tweeting: “If a deal is impossible, and no one wants no deal, then who will finally have the courage to say what the only positive solution is?” There it is in black and white: the EU has offered deliberately unpalatable terms in the hope – a hope sedulously encouraged by John Major, Tony Blair and Nick Clegg – that Britain might somehow be browbeaten into dropping the whole idea of Brexit. Michel Barnier, the EU’s chief negotiator, was quoted in Le Point last month as having said in 2016: “I shall have succeeded in my task if the final deal is so hard on the British that they’ll end up preferring to stay.”

How should we respond to such an attitude? In the long term, I still hope for a European Free Trade Association (Efta)-type solution – although without the wretched customs union, which no Efta country supports. But, for now, I can see only one way through. Most of the actual objections to the Withdrawal Agreement – as opposed to the pretexts of those who are determined to vote against anything proposed by a Tory – centre on the backstop. The backstop is, indeed, an outrage, providing as it does for the regulatory annexation of part of our country and continuing EU control of our trade policy after we have left.

Here, then, is how to have one last shot at a deal. The Commons should vote to approve the other 410 pages of the Withdrawal Agreement, providing for such things as reciprocal rights for each other’s citizens, while excising the 175 pages pertaining to the backstop. The EU might, of course, refuse to accept such terms, and insist on the needless disruption of a no-deal Brexit. This would be, if you think about it, an extraordinarily illogical choice: Brussels and Dublin would be choosing no backstop and nothing else either over no backstop and everything else agreed.

EU leaders might, none the less, be guided by annoyance rather than self-interest, and choose to hurt all sides. But it would at least be clear, in such circumstances, that Britain was dealing with a negotiating partner lacking any interest in a mutually beneficial solution. The EU would be saying, in effect, “Unless you are our subjects, you can’t be our friends”. Could anyone doubt, if it came to that, that we were right to leave? FOLLOW Daniel Hannan on Twitter @DanielJHannan; at telegraph.co.uk/opinion

Michel Barnier, the EU’s chief Brexit negotiator, kisses Theresa May’s hand – yet it was recently reported that he had said his job was to make the deal ‘so hard on the British that they’ll end up preferring to stay’