The film opens with a sequence of households in their morning routines: alarm clocks bleep, children rouse their parents, teeth are brushed, toast is buttered. Sunlight streams into bustling kitchens. It is a parade of what British politicians call “hardworking families”.

Theresa May accused of making UK a laughing stock in Europe Read more

Then the camera shows a middle-aged woman at a desk, sipping coffee and reading a paper. She is glimpsed from an oblique angle. Her face isn’t clear but the viewer knows her name. She is the most famous politician in the country, and the message is obvious: while you start your day she is already hard at work, safeguarding the future – strong and stable.

The woman in the video is Angela Merkel and the film is a highly effective advertisement for her Christian Democratic party from 2013. It is also the dream campaign that Theresa May wishes she could run. In April the prime minister had a reputation for unflashy determination. She called an election on the presumption that voters would see her as the serious woman for serious times: the candidate who would get on with her job so you can get on with your life.

The glaring difference between Merkel’s and May’s brands of solidity is that the German chancellor’s reputation is founded on a record of 11 years in office. During that time, she has witnessed the falls of Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and David Cameron. She has outlasted George W Bush and Barack Obama. Vladimir Putin is the only fixture on the global summitry scene to rival her endurance. She has steered her country through financial crisis and terrorist atrocity.

Consider how Brexit appears to such a veteran: a powerful country relegating itself from the diplomatic premier league and claiming it as a short-cut to the top of the trading champions’ league. It looks potty. Germany manages to be a top-ranking global exporter and a stalwart EU member without one contradicting the other.

One of the most poignant reactions I heard in the aftermath of last year’s referendum was from a German diplomat. He was stunned but also, as an Anglophile, saddened. “We thought of you British as a pragmatic people,” he told me. Our neighbours have not just had to process the economic repercussions of Brexit. The vote, and May’s zealous embrace of it, has changed perceptions of the UK’s character on the world stage. We look volatile, uncooperative, nationalistic. In a speech in Munich on Sunday, Merkel lumped Britain in with Donald Trump’s America as a flaky ally, newly conditional in loyalty to the continent.

For decades EU leaders bridled at the way British newspapers ran jaundiced caricatures of their meetings as a conspiracy against plucky Albion. But they accepted ministerial reassurance that this was a pantomime – a folly that prime ministers had to indulge. And all leaders have domestic audiences to flatter. Merkel’s Munich speech was overwrought because it was a party political pitch with an eye on Bundestag elections in September. But the sentiment resonates beyond German borders. It did not occur to other governments before last June that the tabloid interpretation of the European project might become official UK policy.

This is why Boris Johnson is despised in Brussels. His role as a prime manufacturer and peddler of Europhobic myths, first as a journalist then as a politician, is notorious. He is seen as a pump of banana-straightening mendacity, spewing ill will on to the EU for no purpose other than his own career advancement. Making him foreign secretary was read as a hostile act by May. Then the message got through that Johnson would be peripheral to Brexit, and the decision was reclassified as stupidity.

No deal is the final stop on the bad deal train

Since then, the prime minister has signalled no new understanding of European perspectives and little grasp of what is realistically available from an article 50 deal.

The European commission on Monday published detailed draft negotiating positions on the rights of EU citizens in the UK and on budget liabilities. The government does not publish counter-proposals. Tory and Labour manifestos are vague or silent on detail. Yet the talks begin within a fortnight of polling day. David Davis denied today that Britain was behind on its homework. He boasted of more than 100 pages of detail in a drawer somewhere. That is barely a prologue, given the scale of the task. Whitehall does not echo Davis’s cavalier tone. His department cannot match the EU apparatus for experience and capacity in preparing for what is about to unfold. One official describes panic as every new folder reveals some complex technical challenge to which the only practical negotiating position is “to get on our knees and beg the EU to help”.

Brexit: May’s threat to Europe: 'no deal for Britain is better than a bad deal' Read more

That is why May’s insistence that “no deal is better than a bad deal” is nonsense. The line is popular. It won applause from the audience in Monday’s TV hustings. It has intuitive appeal. Who wants a bad deal? If you are haggling in the souk, you threaten to walk away. If the merchant smells desperation, you will be ripped off. But the UK is not buying a deal from the EU. If article 50 talks fail, the rules of engagement with our neighbours still have to be settled. The difference is that the process would happen in a climate of acrimony, frozen trade, travel gridlock and financial meltdown. There is no such thing as “no deal”. There is orderly transition or there is frantic patching-up of essential arrangements as they expire. No deal is the final stop on the bad-deal train.

If May is bluffing, it is only her domestic audience that can be fooled, and they won’t stay fooled for long. If she isn’t bluffing, she is delusional. The rest of the world knows this and fears the consequences. In private, EU politicians have urged British counterparts to level with voters and prepare them for compromise. Their fear is that UK pragmatism will be lost for good. Merkel has resorted to voicing that anxiety in public. Britons, famously, don’t enjoy taking lessons in international relations from Germany. But when the world’s most experienced democratic leader – a survivor, a grownup – warns that the country is starting to look unhinged, it is worth considering that she may be right.