As the hearing ran into its third hour, almost all heads went down. The glamour of serving on the Brexit select committee had long since begun to pall. Now it was just a long, hard slog. Mostly about stuff that went completely over their heads.



No one had warned them it was going to be this complicated. Nor how long everything was going to take. Theresa May was about to trigger article 50 and they hadn’t got any further than talking about the sort of things they might need to talk about.

Sir Ivan Rogers, Britain’s ambassador to the EU up until his resignation in January, was in his element, however. When he’d suggested to the prime minister that the Brexit negotiations might take 10 years he had intended to be encouraging. Inside the EU bureaucracy, a decade is a mere blinking of an eye. His two-and-a-half-hour appearance before the committee was nothing more than careless whispers.

“Perhaps you could start by telling us what you think the likely order and timescale of the negotiations is likely to be?” said the committee chair, Hilary Benn. Rogers sucked his teeth. It was difficult to say as no one had done it before. But it would go something like this: first there would have to be lengthy negotiations about the terms of the negotiations. The 27 EU countries would want the divorce settlement agreed before the future framework was agreed; we would want to do the two in parallel.

Thinking aloud, let’s say we get an interim agreement on this by the middle of next year, then the 27 countries would want to have a long hard think about what they all individually wanted from a trade deal with Britain and there would be many competing interests. Then everything would grind to a halt for elections and some gory EU budget meetings.

Then everyone would have changed their mind and want to start again. By which time Britain’s two-year exit period would be up and there would have to be lengthy negotiations about what sort of negotiations on transitional arrangements would be acceptable. If and when all this was resolved, then the European parliament would have to be involved. And the same process would start all over again.

The first head hit the table at this point. But Rogers was just getting started. “Brussels beltway … Articles of faith and theology … That boat has sailed … Neuralgic points … No sectoral deals,” he chuntered. They speak another language in Brussels.



Rogers smiled at the blank faces that stared back at him. Good. He hadn’t lost it. Failing to make yourself understood was the hallmark of a top bureaucrat. For a while there was a stand-off, before Rogers took pity. Bless. They were only simple MPs. All they really needed to know was that it was all hideously complicated and was going to end badly.

The Eurosceptic MP John Whittingdale tried to argue that it couldn’t be that hard to get a deal because we would be starting from roughly the same place. Rogers shook his head. If anything it was even harder, because divergence was a lot more contentious than convergence.



“It’s not about what happens on Brexit Day plus one,” he said. “It’s about what happens further down the line. Because if we were intending to leave everything exactly the same there would have been no point in leaving.” And even if we did realise we had made a hideous mistake and promised to leave everything the same, the rest of the EU wouldn’t believe us.

Sensing Rogers was a great deal brighter than all of them and that they were out of their depth, Michael Gove wisely chose not to probe too deeply. Would he like to say if he thought government ministers were still as muddled as they had been at Christmas? He wouldn’t. So did that mean there was no longer a muddle? Rogers smiled. Hadn’t Gove listened to any of the muddle he had spent the last two hours describing?

“There’s actually quite a lot of sunshine out there,” said Rogers as the last head thudded into the table.

“I miss the sunshine in this committee,” muttered Dominic Raab.