We must keep No Deal on the table, they tell us, or the EU won't take us seriously. If you've ever negotiated anything, they tell us, you have to retain the option to walk away or they'll just wait until you're desperate enough to take whatever crap old deal they want to offer.
"It's like walking away from buying a secondhand car," he argued three weeks ago when he managed a bonus few hours in the limelight by tabling the vacuous "Brady amendment" that was then put together with the ramshackle "Malthouse compromise" to produce something that made lots of Tory MPs ask themselves "Is that really what I voted for?"
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If you go in ready to buy a car, and you decide the one which looked so attractive through the window is actually not what you wanted, you politely say "No thanks" and you walk away. And what have you lost? Nothing. You go home in the clapped out old banger you arrived in, and go back to surveying the sales sites.That's not where we are though. That's not what we're doing. We're in a process where we lose the car we turned up in when the dealer shuts up shop at 6pm, whatever we decide. So if we don't go for anything in the showroom, we're walking home.
There's also the slight problem that the other side considers that the haggling is over. And they think that... because you've agreed a deal with them, and you've shaken hands with the other 27, and you've told them it's great, and you've taken it home where your cabinet has also approved it.
Then you have to face the world again when the Parliament which also has to vote for it, the Parliament you haven't bothered, haven't dared, to keep involved, just tells you to piss off.
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There is an option which allows you to walk away and lose nothing, drive home happily in the old banger and tell the kids that something better will turn up next week.It's called revocation.
