Sunday’s summit was always going to be the easiest hurdle for Brexit, and it is not the last. Brussels had applied its favourite crisis management method to the UK’s departure: smother it in process. European Council President Donald Tusk and British Prime Minister Theresa May during Sunday's round table meeting in Brussels. Credit:AP The EU demanded the UK answer, in exacting legal detail, the questions that its departure posed: does that mean you want to risk the hard-won peace in Northern Ireland with new customs checks at the Irish border? Does that mean you want new tariffs and customs paperwork that will incentivise every manufacturing business with an EU-integrated supply chain to flee over the Channel?

Does that mean you’re happy for your financial service providers to lose access to the continent? No, no, no, eventually came the response. Meanwhile, Brexiteers dropped out of the UK government like overripe fruit. Loading There is a range of popular children’s books whose titles begin “That’s Not My …” Most British Brexiteer politicians have fled to the politically safer ground of “That’s Not My Brexit”, leaving others to sign up to the inevitable compromise.

They never had a majority for their “damn the torpedoes” Brexit. But they did have a point. This is, undoubtedly, the EU’s Brexit. Its lawyers wrote all the drafts of the withdrawal deal, pre-empting the UK’s political inability to do so. British Prime Minister Theresa May’s negotiators (her Brexit ministers only occasionally among them) quibbled and did win concessions, most notably in the political declaration accompanying the deal, an aspirational document that describes a vaguely promising trade, customs and security deal to follow in some years’ time. But the EU had process and reason on its side, and the UK had mostly chaos. The EU 27 were remarkably resolute in their aims and negotiation strategy, while the Conservative government couldn't even agree with itself. Cynics paid little attention to the last-minute panic over Gibraltar. It was the best kind of problem. It sounded like an existential threat to the deal, but really only required some inconsequential, non-binding promises. A Spanish PM facing regional elections needed a win, and he was given enough to be able to claim one. Loading Replay Replay video Play video Play video

Of course, May looked like she’d caved, yet again. That’s the narrative, and she can wear it. It’s her job right now: she takes the political heat, internalises it and just carries on. When Europe’s leaders came to judge the 585-page Brexit deal and its much shorter political declaration cousin, they barely needed to discuss it. Loading Their biggest problem is how to make it stick, given it must pass the British Parliament, most of whose members have spent the last fortnight complaining about it. Hence the rhetoric on Sunday.

“I am totally convinced that this is the only deal possible,” European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker said. “Those who do think by rejecting the deal that they would have a better deal will be disappointed in the first seconds after the rejection of this deal.” “There isn’t a plan B,” Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar insisted. “The truth is what we have here is the best deal that’s available both for the United Kingdom and for the European Union.” "Any other deal really only exists in people's imaginations." May echoed the EU lines.

“If people think somehow there’s another negotiation to be done, that’s not the case,” she told reporters after the summit. “This is … the result of what [have] been tough and difficult negotiations over a significant period of time. We’ve said this is the deal that’s on the table, this is the best possible deal. It’s the only possible deal.” All eyes turn now to the House of Commons, and a vote on this deal due most likely in the second week of December. Some MPs appear to think they can vote against a "no deal" Brexit, just like you can decide not to be prosecuted for theft if you walk out of a shop without paying. In fact the only way MPs can avoid a no-deal is by voting for this deal or for some alternative, such as another referendum or a general election, that might prove grounds for the EU granting a Brexit extension beyond March. But none of the obvious alternatives could win a majority of votes right now, if you take MPs on their word.

Some think that the "backstop", a last-resort section of the deal that would leave the UK subject to the customs union and elements of the single market if a trade deal can’t be reached, can be somehow edited out of the deal. Hence the insistence from Brussels that this is the deal, take it or leave it (tarnished slightly by the Lithuanian President's acknowledgement that the British could come back with a "request for renegotiations"). So for the next few weeks it’s Downing Street’s job to, in the words of another masterpiece, whip it, and whip it good. Reportedly, May’s lieutenants are already hard at work wielding sticks and carrots to win Tory votes for the deal. They are offering peerages, promising pet projects, binning policies. The British Chancellor is said to have gone back to the Northern Irish DUP with an open chequebook. They are chucking everything possible out of the basket to keep this Brexit balloon up.