Andrew Neil and the Brexit bus to nowhere

Asked at some point in the early 1960s how it felt to watch his New York Yankees team-mates Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris repeatedly hit back-to-back home runs, Lawrence “Yogi” Berra is said to have replied: “It’s like deja vu all over again”. Anyone seeking out quality entertainment the other night might have felt the same.

Rob Brydon’s new show Destination X took contestants around Europe in a blacked-out coach, leaving with no idea of what route they were following, where their final destination might be or whether any of them would get anything positive out of the experience. As it turned out, the vast majority were destined to end up losers, thrown under a large bus that once promised so much. Remind you of any unfolding disasters of the last nine years?

If Destination X did not appeal, there was always “Destination Brexit”, aka the Jacob Rees-Mogg show that was screened on the migrant hate and conspiracy theory channel GBeebies. Lord Snooty teed up Wednesday’s instalment with this tempting offer on social media: “Brexit is being reversed by stealth and you will pay the higher costs. I will be discussing this with Lord Frost on GBNews from 8 o’clock.”

Alas, this tempting low-budget version of Jurassic World Rebirth was a date I had to skip, having already committed myself to a night in with media dinosaur Andrew Neil and his latest piece for the Daily Mail, headlined “Trump has left Ursula von der Leyen’s career hanging by a thread – and shown our Brexit negotiators were truly pathetic”.

In the fashion of a sweaty middle-aged man in cap and singlet grasping for a younger exercise partner, Brillo reached for the hyperbole to laud the president’s brilliance at imposing extra taxes on his own people via tariffs, while castigating von der Leyen for her reluctance to import inflation into her own bloc. “It’s not exactly quid pro quo,” Neil crowed, jeering stupid old Europe for not making Europeans pay more for stuff.

My colleague Jonty Bloom has already weighed in on why the EU was right to walk away from a fight not worth having, so let’s look more closely on the other half of Neil’s screed, in which he claims “it makes you wonder why British politicians didn’t play similar hardball during the Brexit talks… the EU had a lot to lose in the Brexit talks just as it had a lot to lose in the current talks with Trump. Yet at no stage did a British prime minister ever try to leverage that fact in anything like the plain-speaking manner Trump has just employed.”

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And so, like deja vu all over again, we are back to 2016, where the UK holds all the cards in negotiations with the EU. Or perhaps we have travelled to an alternative universe, where despite being far smaller and less influential, the UK somehow holds exactly the same cards as the US (the EU’s largest external trading partner, remember, with a $220bn trade surplus that gave von der Leyen and Brussels plenty to think about).

And is it just me, or didn’t we actually try Trump-style hardball – threatening no-deal, unlawfully proroguing Parliament and all that, cheered on by the same Daily Mail that employs Neil? But it failed, largely because we were a junior partner that had burned our own cards in the referendum, and was desperately seeking decent access to its nearest market. We ended up being pathetically grateful for a dreadful free trade agreement that featured no coverage for services (the key part of the UK economy) and which stored up years of unresolved issues that Keir Starmer is now finally fixing.

Or as Yogi Berra once said, “We made too many wrong mistakes.”