Right at the start of Gladiator, there’s a bit where Russell Crowe’s forces are waiting for the return of the negotiator they’ve sent to do a deal with the barbarians. The negotiator’s horse is heard returning, leading to a brief soar in hopes, before Maximus Crowe observes its rider is now headless. Correctly parsing this nuanced negotiating gambit, he judges: “They say no.”
Spoiler 1: thereafter, it doesn’t end well for the barbarians. Spoiler 2: even though I can exclusively reveal that UK prime minister Boris Johnson knows Latin, his government does not take the role of the Roman army in this Brexit negotiations analogy.
Anyway, hold on to your nappies, because it’s yet another crunch week in the Brexit we apparently got done eight months ago. This morning the EU chief negotiator, Michel Barnier, arrived in London for a crucial round of trade talks. After a weekend of no-deal sabre-rattling, Barnier would have been expecting the usual British threats to walk away/relieve him of his head. However, in a change to our scheduled programming, the government is also now affecting not to understand the Brexit deal it has already signed, and will reportedly seek to override it in an internal market bill to be published on Wednesday.
According to the splash on Johnson’s OnlyFans account (the Daily Telegraph), his government will tell the EU that it was simply “unforeseen” that its own deal could leave Northern Ireland isolated from the rest of the UK. This has gone down about as well as one might have foreseen in Northern Ireland, a country currently part of the UK, and which the Westminster government seems to think enjoys painful uncertainty.
“Brexit deal never made sense,” runs the Telegraph headline ascribed to the prime minister who negotiated it, then made it the centrepiece of his entire election campaign. Well quite. Who could possibly have predicted this, much less loudly and at very great length at the time? Johnson’s promise that his Brexit deal was “oven ready” carried all the conviction of the minicab operator telling you “he’s just pulling into your road now”. (Translation: he’s in Rio and hasn’t yet passed his driving test.)
Speaking of changes to our scheduled programming, there’s just been another one. As I was typing the previous paragraph, Brandon Lewis announced to the Commons that the government would indeed be breaking international law – “but in a very specific and limited way”. This morning, it emerged that Jonathan Jones, the head of the government’s legal department, had resigned over this Downing Street plan to row back on aspects of the withdrawal agreement, presumably regarding respect for international law as a bit of a dealbreaker. Responsibility for upholding the law rests with … hang on, let me get my reading glasses on … ah: attorney general and leading invertebrate Suella Braverman. So it’s impossible to foresee how this one will play out.
Elsewhere there are suggestions that the UK is acting like a toddler in its dealings with the EU, which feels unfair. Toddlers are famously incredible negotiators. Our negotiator, meanwhile, is David Frost, whose Downing Street call sign is “Frosty”. Are you familiar with David? He has the look of a Guildford-based Jaguar dealer prepared to pull the kids out of private school to fund his court battle against his ex-wife. (“Let’s see how she likes that.”)
To be clear, the above was just a fantasy sequence. In real life, Frosty the No Man cites his inspo as Charles de Gaulle, who he says “always behaved as if his country was a great country even when it seemed to have fallen very low, and thus made it become a great country yet again.” This was certainly true of De Gaulle, who infuriated rather a lot of his own allies – including Churchill – with this type of posturing. As Julian Jackson remarks in his biography of the general: “Behaving like a great power was De Gaulle’s way of becoming one.”
Unfortunately, Britain is not behaving like a great power, despite cheerleaders such as the Daily Express describing some nonsense wheeze of Iain Duncan Smith’s as a “new ace up Britain’s sleeve” - a metaphor that simply confirms the UK is a country that cheats at cards.
The best you could say is that Britain is behaving like Donald Trump, and it is certainly a matter of opinion how great again he has made America. Lying, reneging, then lying about the lies you told: these tactics might get you out of a hole in the short term, and your supporters might even cheer you for it. But ultimately, they corrode public life to the point where it is widely believed that there are no objective facts at all, and that all news is fake. As can be seen from Russia to America, this harms people on all sides of any political divide, and betrays every citizen governed by people who choose to indulge in it.
Still, on we go. This time last year an apparently discombobulated Johnson was rolled onstage at a police academy, where he eventually remembered to gibber out his prepared line, a promise that he’d “rather be dead in a ditch than delay Brexit”. The next month, he delayed it. And there is, for many, an evens chance that he’ll do the same again, and agree some face-saving deal at the last minute.
And look, no one is saying that negotiating has ever been a solely noble calling, and there’s certainly nothing unusual in treating it as a down-and-dirty art. Take the entertainment industry. Any history of its greatest dealmakers will introduce you to some of the most enormous, most unreasonable and most unscrupulous shitbirds ever to stalk the Earth, whose insistence on wildly overplaying their hand absolutely every time usually results in more refined and dignified opponents becoming too exhausted not to capitulate.
As I’m sure Frosty likes to tell the reflection in his bathroom mirror: it’s called showbusiness, not showfriends. So let’s just hope he’s our Louis B Mayer, our Peter Grant, our Michael Ovitz. And not just some guy poking his finger through his jacket and hissing, “Don’t move! I’ve got a gun.” Hand on heart, though, I’m not sure that the other David (Geffen) ever pretended not to understand one of his own deals in order to unpick it later and get a better one.
But either way, setting ourselves up as the country you really can’t trust seems an eccentric way to launch a new era of global dealmaking. I know some on the UK government’s side have long sought to characterise these negotiations as the righteous Jedi (them) versus the nefarious Trade Federation (the EU). But this has long indicated that the Star Wars franchise is just one more thing they don’t understand. If Johnson really does carry on at this rate, it will be akin to the Emperor demonstrating the Death Star is a fully operational battle station by blowing itself up instead of Alderaan. See, you idiots! I told you we weren’t bluffing!
• Marina Hyde is a Guardian columnist
• Join the Guardian live event tomorrow, Are we heading for a no-deal Brexit? As talks reach a crucial stage we’ll be discussing this with Prof Anand Menon and Guardian journalists Sonia Sodha, Lisa O’Carroll and Jennifer Rankin. On Wednesday 9 September at 7pm
