August is normally the month when politics takes a break and leaves the air waves clear for the likes of Jacob Rees-Mogg. Not this year.

Last week the Government published Brexit papers on its ideas to keep the Irish border open and to avoid future customs bureaucracy when British businesses export to Europe.

This week, Whitehall will publish no fewer than five negotiating papers in areas ranging from the sharing of data across national boundaries, to civil judicial co-operation across Europe and the arrangements for sharing official documents between nations. In other words, Britain is working hard to prove we can recreate what we already have.

Why the frenzy of activity? Some suspicious minds believe it’s because the Government wants to avoid the meddling interference of a Parliament currently in recess; others say it’s because civil servants want to avoid the meddling interference of ministers enjoying their holidays. Except you don’t need to turn to conspiracy theories for an answer, when the truth was spelt out by the Brexit Secretary in an article for The Sunday Times yesterday.

The excited headlines spoke of David Davis “cranking up the pressure on the European Commission” and “warning Brussels that the clock is ticking”.

But the negotiations are proceeding exactly to the timetable that the EU set earlier this summer, and which Britain was forced reluctantly to accept. Unless the other 27 countries of the EU agree, unanimously, that “sufficient progress” has been made in settling Britain’s bill for leaving the EU and on securing the rights of EU citizens living here, then they simply will not move on to a discussion about future trading arrangements.

Davis’s weak hand

Yet this is precisely the conversation that Britain desperately needs. Mr Davis, who has made much of how he needs to play his negotiating cards close to his chest, was forced to reveal the weakness of his hand.

He wrote that “both sides need to move swiftly on to discussing our future partnership and we want that to happen after the European Council in October”. So much for constructive ambiguity about what Britain needs. Read Mr Davis’s article closely, and gone is the pretence that Britain can walk away from the table. The phrase “no deal is better than a bad deal” is absent.

The Cabinet has finally acknowledged this month that we need a transition period where we remain in the customs union to provide business with “much-needed certainty”.

It seems to have escaped the attention of some of the signatories to this historic peace agreement — the Foreign and Trade Secretaries — that they also need 27 other nations and the European Parliament to agree to this transition.

It’s common knowledge that Britain is not going to have the new customs computers, farm-payment schemes, airplane agreements and so on in place by March 2019 to be able to walk away without a deal, so we can expect a high price for that transition.

Perhaps in recognition of that, gone too is the claim that we’ll get £350 million a week back from the EU to spend on the NHS. Mr Davis, in his article, not only accepted that Britain faced a one-off bill, or “financial obligations”, for leaving but raised the prospect of ongoing payments to the EU — “programmes that the UK wants to consider participating in”.

The idea of a complete break from the overview of the European Court of Justice has been subtly ditched — now the talk is only of an end to “the direct jurisdiction” of the ECJ.

Mr Davis says he’s looking forward to meeting the EU negotiator Michel Barnier later this month. He will no doubt find his opposite number well rested.

For watching the goings-on on this side of the Channel this August, we suspect Mr Barnier will not have broken into a sweat as he takes his favoured walking holiday in the French Alps.