The flurry of excitement in national newspaper newsrooms and on the trading floors on Wednesday illustrated one thing: the Brexit summer holiday is over, and with negotiations at the squeaky-bum end of the process, the slightest indication of where this is all going to end up will be seized upon, make headlines and move markets. But it is worth looking at some facts – not always the highest-value commodity in the Brexit debate.

The fateful words from Michel Barnier that triggered the value of the pound to jump by 1% to $1.3029 were, sadly for Downing Street, nothing new. The EU was proposing “a partnership with Britain such as has never been with any other third country”, the EU’s chief negotiator said during his visit to Berlin.

Traders interpreted this to be an opening to Theresa May’s Chequers proposals, under which the UK would benefit from something akin to single market access for its traders in agricultural and industrial goods, and a friction-free customs border.

But Barnier last uttered these words on 2 August during a press conference in Brussels in which he forensically tore apart the prime minister’s white paper, warning that its ideas on a new customs arrangement and trade in goods represented a threat to the integrity of the EU.

Handily, Barnier himself explained a little better in an interview aired on Thursday with the German radio station Deutschlandfunk. “We have been willing to form a strong relationship from the beginning,” Barnier told the station. “Twenty-seven heads of state and government, including Angela Merkel and the French president and other heads of state, have proposed a unique partnership with the United Kingdom.”

The deal was, he said, unprecedented in that it went further than mere agreement on tariff-free trade, taking in areas from “aviation to university and research cooperation, to internal and external security and foreign policy”.

Barnier said of the EU’s offer: “It cannot be built to the detriment of who we are. The internal market, the home market, is indeed our most important asset ... We respect all the red lines of the United Kingdom. They do not want to abide by the rules of the court of justice, they do not want to follow our legal framework, they do not want to pay, they do not want freedom of movement. All of these are the cornerstones of the single market and the EU. So we have to preserve and protect what makes us.”

The Chequers proposal is dead, the zombie white paper just doesn’t know it yet. So what to make of the suggestion in the Times (paywall) that because the French president, Emmanuel Macron, has a vision of a Europe of “concentric circles”, with the EU and the euro at its core and Britain in a second ring, there is reason to believe that Paris is softening to May’s proposals?

The idea of a multi-speed Europe has done the rounds before. Macron raised it last September in a major speech outlining his plans for a “profound transformation” of Europe. But where does the UK really fit in?

Again, handily, Macron gave a speech on Monday to French ambassadors gathered from around the world in which he spelled out what he actually thinks. It offered Downing Street little succour. Brexit, he said, was akin to the elevation of Donald Trump to the White House: an example of the “extremism” that prospers from the rage of those who feel they have lost to globalisation, and to which the French president has set himself in opposition. Of the deal that might be struck with the UK, the door to Chequers was firmly shut.

“Brexit is a sovereign choice which must be respected, but it is a choice which cannot be made at the expense of the European Union’s integrity,” Macron told his diplomats. “It is what the British people have chosen for themselves, not for others, and France would like to maintain a strong, special relationship with London, but not at the cost of the European Union breaking up.”

It was certainly London’s right to champion the benefits of Brexit, the French president said. That “is one thing ... but we have to defend the integrity of our values, of our foundations and of the European Union”. To echo the British prime minister’s words during her disastrous general election campaign, this time really nothing has changed.