THE fourth round of Brexit talks was about to start in Brussels as I wrote this column, which led me to reflect on how far we have come since the referendum of June 23, 2016. The answer has to be not all that far. The issue back then seemed clear-cut enough from the UK point of view: “Brexit means Brexit”, to use the formulation the Prime Minister-in-waiting would herself hit on before long. If striking in its simplicity, it lacked detail – and so it remains to this day.

The other member states reeled from the blow of Brexit, but were quicker in recovering their wits. After the summer holidays, they appointed the French mandarin Michel Barnier as their chief negotiator. He spent the next couple of months touring the European capitals to build consensus, and by the turn of the year he had his brief ready to be approved by a summit

of the EU27. Then they all had to wait for May to trigger Article 50

last March.

The story since has been of the UK’s steady step-by-step retreat from the stark simplicity of “Brexit means Brexit”, a retreat which had in fact already started even before the triggering of Article 50. At the same time the EU27 have been adamantine in sticking to the position negotiated and agreed among themselves. They have blown sometimes hot, sometimes cold, alternately treating the UK with something close to cold contempt, and then giving it a pat on the head for its improved manners, as Barnier did in his comment on the Prime Minister’s speech in Florence last Friday. But basically the UK has abandoned one sticking point after another. The pattern is so well established that we must doubt whether there is anything likely to alter it now.

Much of the argy-bargy has centred round the future of immigration, with the closely connected questions of the single market and the rights of European citizens who are today living in a country other than their native one. Of these, Brexit affects four or five million, maybe a couple of million of our citizens over there, and three million of theirs over here, some completely legal and others just doing their own thing wherever they happen to have landed.

The existence of such a large interchange is by itself a sign of the positive benefits in the movement of people from countries where they have less chance to work into countries where they have more chance to work. In the end, the whole EU has profited. The trend is seen clearly in Scotland, for example, with a birth-rate that has fallen below the level needed to sustain the existing level of population: we must attract immigrants to supply the workforce for our economy to grow. Unfortunately a majority of the English take the opposite point of view and want to shut out immigrants regardless. The UK Government, having assured Scots it will take their interests into account, ignores them when it comes to pandering to this blinkered bigotry.

Towards our European partners the attitude has been quite opposite, if unaccompanied by any noticeable goodwill. A year ago the Secretary of State for Brexit, David Davis, was still going round breezily claiming that the UK’s withdrawal need only have any real effect on immigration – though indeed the European Court of Justice was a big bone of contention too. Davis imagined that otherwise the exchanges of goods, services and capital would carry on much as before. It came as a shock when the Europeans insisted these three freedoms were indivisible from the fourth freedom, freedom of movement, with all of them forming the essential foundations of the single market. Obvious as that seems, I think May’s government is still struggling to get its collective head round it.

Davis yet kept his pecker up on the airy assumption that access to the single market could be conceptually and practically separated from membership of it. A year ago he wrote: “Once the European nations realise that we are not going to budge on control of our borders, they will want to talk, in their own interest.” But on the contrary, up to now they have not wanted to talk, not till we have settled what they call the “separation issues” – the bill for Brexit, the subsequent rights of EU citizens, and Ireland.

Given the glacial pace of progress on all these, there is an obvious chance nothing much else will have been decided on the future relations of the UK and the EU by the time we are supposed to part company forever in April 2019. In that case we revert to the regime of the World Trade Organisation, with its more onerous rules and levies. The Brexit negotiation will have failed.

Or rather, it would fail were it not for May’s announcement in Florence of another two years of transition, while we seek a “bespoke deal” requiring “creative and imaginative solutions”. The UK would remain meanwhile in the single market – perhaps in the hope, at least among some members of her Cabinet, of open access being extended after the further two years are up. It might be thought this form of quasi-membership must include any additional rules the EU happens to agree on in the interim (now without the UK having a vote). But Boris Johnson says no to that. There would still be free movement of people, but Europeans arriving in the UK would need to register, presumably as a prelude to stricter constraints after the transition finishes. There cannot be much chance of the EU27 accepting this.

And another new arrangement would be dreamed up by which UK courts would “take account” of decisions by the European Court of Justice, something again unlikely to be attractive to our former partners. They live in an EU where all stick to decisions already taken. We live in the land of absolute parliamentary sovereignty (after 2021 to be fully restored), where nobody has any rights that a majority at Westminster cannot take away.

This was no longer a formidable menu of “Brexit means Brexit”. Without saying so, the UK had long abandoned that. The remaining wish-list is bitty and jumbled, even easier to unpick. Remember that all the while Theresa May’s ministers have been squabbling and fighting, the position Barnier had formed by the end of 2016 has remained unchanged. He rejects even alterations in the order he wishes to discuss things, so that the question of permanent trading relations must await solutions to the separation issues. If the UK Government disagrees, he just waits till it changes its mind.

Remember also his consistent line that non-membership of the EU has to be worse than membership – otherwise the whole project, dating back 60 years, would just dissolve. I read May’s speech in Florence as a plea to abandon that principle too. On this as on everything else, she and her government have in fact been getting nowhere. Her call for “creative and imaginative solutions”, none of which she cared to specify for herself, is no more than a request for the EU27 to abandon the stated positions in their negotiating mandate. Actually it cannot be changed except by another summit, where any member state can veto any proposition, even if it is supported by the rest. May’s is at bottom the language of desperation: help me! But she is not a woman who helps people in trouble, so why should anybody else feel like helping her?

Can the UK give way on immigration? I think not. Can the EU27 give way on the powers of the European Court of Justice? I think not. The negotiations are headed for failure, with the resignation of May and a bloodbath as the Conservative party seeks a successor. No doubt Jeremy Corbyn will at length emerge from it all as Prime Minister, but his ideas on Europe appear no more coherent than hers: he will be another victim of events. Florence was the city of Niccolo Machiavelli, who wrote that “there are three classes of intellects: one which comprehends by itself; another which appreciates what others comprehend; and a third which neither comprehends by itself nor by the showing of others.” There can be not much doubt in which class he would place this miserable generation of UK politicians.