Brexiteers want to control — or abolish. The mindset is not to build, try for win/win deals or respect the views of others with different interests. It is to assert their will — and if that is thwarted to try to abolish the opposition.

Leaving the EU was born of this attitude: membership might mean building the largest rules-based free trading area in the world but it meant doing deals with others. Because the EU would not dance to every British whim, the only option was stopping our membership.

Similarly with the two-year negotiations. When Brexiteers say they want a deal, they don’t mean what the rest of humanity understands by a deal. They want one only on their terms whatever the reality. Thus Boris Johnson’s extraordinary leaked overnight tirade . It could be that so many industries’ concerns that they will be devastated by being locked out of the EU customs system are well grounded — or deserve a hearing.

Instead they, the Treasury and the EU are seen as hostile enemies full of fearful nonsense that must be crushed. Equally, Jacob Rees-Mogg has suggested that a solution to the Irish border question is easy: the Republic of Ireland should leave the EU too. Just abolish the issue.

This is why just nine months before the date of leaving there is not a semblance of agreement on what future economic relationships will be. Every British suggestion, even those coming from the Brexit-sympathetic leadership of the Labour Party, is characterised by the same attitude.”

A customs union,” a “max fac” border, a “shared” single market and all the other ruses to find some way of sustaining frictionless trade without which key sectors — ranging from the car industry to higher education —face ruinous disruption suffer from the same fatal weakness.

They try to maximise British control while abolishing/ wishing-away our partners’ interests – excused because this is the alleged sovereign “will of the British people”, understood only by Brexiteers, and as if no other people had sovereign wills.

Understood in these terms, the proposals don’t fly. The EU has built a club around common rules, and while it might bend to accommodate a club member, it is harder to accommodate the “third” country we are set on becoming. The British political class is playing control-and-abolish games in its own bubble; it is the first instinct in a winner-take-all democracy that confers unfettered sovereignty on the biggest party in the Commons. When Mrs Thatcher could not control metropolitan authorities, she scrapped them.

The bid to abolish our relationship with the continent of which we are part can only end in failure: geography, proximity and an intense network of relationships must be respected. Ultimately, the control-and-abolish mindset will be seen for what it is: vainglorious narcissism of which Boris Johnson is the embodiment. Then Britain will return to where it belongs — a full member of the EU.