Nobody knows when, but the Brexit secretary, Dominic Raab, is likely to be back soon at the VIP door of the European commission’s Berlaymont headquarters and heading up to the fifth floor to meet his EU opposite number, Michel Barnier. Deadlines and crunch summits have been and gone. Now time is running out to make a Brexit deal. So it is back to Brussels.

It wasn’t meant to be like this. The UK has been angling for EU leaders to make an offer since the beginning of the Brexit process. Before the Salzburg summit, Theresa May appealed to her counterparts to put themselves in her place, hoping they would understand better than “a technocrat in Brussels”, as one ally told the Financial Times. Over the summer British ministers had toured the continent in a bid to win hearts and minds for the prime minister’s Chequers strategy.

The gambit failed. One EU minister even “felt a bit used” by a British ministerial visit judged to be no more than a media hit targeted at British audiences, recounts one diplomat, but that London had become very attentive since the Brexit vote. “In the old days we could hardly get a junior minister to come to speak to us.”

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Some are more philosophical. “There is a general feeling that they use these visits to reach their home audiences, but probably that is what politicians do everywhere,” another EU diplomat observed.

Whether it’s down to irritation or indifference, the British attempt to sidestep the “technocrats” of Brussels has drawn a blank. For many EU observers, the only surprise is how long the UK persisted.

“The British side have consumed a lot of goodwill in the way they have handled Brexit,” says Lotta Nymann-Lindegren, until recently Finland’s Brexit attache. She thinks May mishandled the Salzburg summit, a week that ended with the visibly-furious prime minister demanding respect. May would argue she is defending the referendum result, but her address to EU leaders was read as an uncompromising “Chequers or death” ultimatum.

“She blamed the EU for everything and criticised everybody and then she wondered that EU leaders were a bit reluctant to help her out,” Nymann-Lindegren said.

With the cabinet mutinous over Brexit, EU leaders are glad the politically thankless task of Brexit has been entrusted to Barnier. At the October Brexit summit, the 27 presidents and prime ministers knocked the table in appreciation of the Frenchman. A few days earlier, business leaders gave him a standing ovation.

Some diplomats admit they were sceptical when Barnier was named the EU’s Brexit negotiator. Two years in the job, and he has disarmed critics with his courteous and careful public statements, powerpoint slides and diligent travel around 27 national capitals and the European parliament. “He is at the top of his art,” says Philippe Lamberts, a Belgian Green MEP on the European parliament’s Brexit steering group not given to flatter political rivals.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest After two years as the EU’s chief Brexit negotiator, Barnier has disarmed his critics. Photograph: John Thys/AFP/Getty Images

“What creates trust is the fact that Barnier is connecting back to his political masters all the time,” Lamberts says. “That doesn’t mean that he has a GoPro camera on his head during the negotiating sessions … we can trust him.”

Barnier’s team, led by the German trade expert Sabine Weyand, has been given huge leeway to strike a deal with London. As talks entered their most intensive phase earlier this month, she told diplomats she needed their trust to go into “the tunnel”, non-stop talks with a news blackout. EU ambassadors were in the dark on details. During long days of talks, sustained by salad and quiche from the commission canteen, Weyand and her opposite number, Olly Robbins, tested out politically-explosive ideas such as extending the transition period. Although their face-to-face talks only resumed on Tuesday, the pair have remained in constant contact.

EU insiders say London is mistaken to imagine Angela Merkel or Emmanuel Macron negotiating, say, animal health checks on sheep, in the dead of a November night. Brexit is not seen as an existential threat for the EU, like the eurozone crisis that threatened to bring down the single market, dragging EU leaders into endless summits full of technical smallprint. It is seen as a British problem the EU must live with.

“For the EU [Brexit] is only something that has to be handled, contained, organised,” says Nymann-Lindegren. “It suits the heads of state and government perfectly that the commission takes the bad guy role that bears the burden of interaction with the UK.”

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Many argue London has consistently misread the EU. “Sometimes the UK debate is very insular,” says Claus Grube, a former Danish ambassador to the UK and EU. The UK debate is “based on ideology and emotions”, for the EU “it is based on taking care of our real interests” he says.

The EU’s approach was fixed in the summer of 2016, between the Brexit vote and a summit in Bratislava in September. It was agreed no one outside the club should get the same benefits as members. Gripped by anxiety they would be outfoxed by clever British civil servants, EU officials decided to wait for London to say what it wanted from Brexit. It was a strategy that united the 27 member states, just as the EU was riven by conflict over migration and the rule of law.

Not everyone is impressed. The UK’s former ambassador to Brussels, Ivan Rogers, thinks the EU has shown “dangerous complacency on the British question”. In a conscious echo of John Maynard Keynes, who warned of the dangers of a bad peace in 1919, Rogers argues that the EU’s reluctance to go beyond “a smooth technocratic approach” contributes to the risk of both sides sleepwalking into a disastrous no-deal.

The argument has few takers in Brussels. “If a choice has to be made between colder UK-EU relations and weakening of the single market, I think [leaders] will choose the former,” Lamberts says. “Don’t forget Brexit is the creation of the United Kingdom.”