The devil’s in those 1,722 pages of detail

I leave it to others to speculate on whether, in Theresa May’s Downing Street outburst against Brussels she was “speaking for England”, or had gone off her head. But one leaked detail of her dinner the previous week with Jean‑Claude Juncker and the EU’s chief negotiator, Michel Barnier, is worth dwelling on.

To remind Mrs May of just what she and the EU are up against in the next 18 months, Juncker was said to have plonked on the table two documents, the EU’s trade deal with Canada and the EU’s accession treaty with Croatia in 2011.

Both are very relevant to our concerns, because Mrs May not only hopes to negotiate an unprecedented trade deal: at the end of the negotiations, there will also have to be a secession treaty, covering much of the same ground as an accession treaty, but in reverse.

The Comprehensive Economic and Trade Agreement (CETA), which gave Canada much less access to the European market than we enjoy now, is incredibly complex, covered 1,598 pages and took seven years to negotiate. The Croatia treaty, like any accession treaty, had to cover 35 “chapters” or policy areas, only six of which refer to trade; and was again extremely complex, filling 124 pages, which took six years to agree.