Five years ago today, Boris Johnson won a general election after campaign built on a promise to Get Brexit Done. However, the last few days suggest there is still an awful lot of Brexit going on.

On Monday, Rachel Reeves became the first UK chancellor since Brexit to be to granted an hour’s audience with the European finance ministers. She used it to make a plea for deeper economic cooperation between the UK and the EU, which she rightly said was “not zero sum”, and rehearsed some of the familiar lines about the benefits to the EU of better access to the UK’s capital markets. She is also seeking “more normal” trading relations – but Great Britain does have “normal” trading relations with the EU for a country that is neither a member of the Single Market nor in a Customs Union. The problem for Reeves is that the EU is already branding some of the implicit asks as cherry picking.

On Tuesday the Northern Ireland Assembly had the chance to vote to shuffle out of the Windsor Framework. Spoiler alert – it didn’t. But the majority was not cross-community and the lengthy debate involved unionist after unionist complaining both about the impacts of the Framework but also about the way in which allowing a simple majority to decide something of this importance violated the central tenet of the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement.

Meanwhile the Product Regulation and Metrology Bill – which gives the government quite wide powers to align with EU regulation, if it wants, through secondary legislation – has completed its Lords stages (in the face of opposition from Lords Brexiters). This – as Lord Frost has pointed out – opens the way up for voluntary alignment with a lot of EU legislation if ministers want to use those powers.

But, perhaps most importantly, the competition (sort of) for the new senior official to lead the UK relationship reset closed. Speculation is that the government has managed to lure back former Treasury official Michael Ellam from his berth in the City, to bring experience to the role. The appointee will act as the PM’s EU adviser (“sherpa”) and Nick Thomas-Symonds’ lead official in the newly recreated Europe Unit in the Cabinet Office. Thomas-Symonds told the Lords European Affairs select committee (no Commons equivalent exists) on Tuesday how that unit is bringing all the disparate Brexit elements together. It clearly would have been better not to have waited six months to make this appointment – but it is good that the government has come to realise that it needs to bolster its strategic thinking on Europe (and beyond). Because strategic thinking is what is missing at the moment.

The UK’s strategic Brexit vacuum is being filled by the EU nailing down its red lines

The government can be forgiven for taking time to get its ducks lined up – and now needs to take account of a context in which every move with the EU has, whatever the rhetoric, potential implications for relations with a Trump 2 US administration.  

Its problem is that the EU has not been so backward, and has apparently been nailing down its asks in advance of the UK.  
In the original Brexit negotiations, the UK was blindsided by the EU imposition of sequencing which meant the EU withdrawal terms had to be largely agreed before the EU would open talks about the future relationship. The UK too often was left with an unacceptable EU text because it failed to fill a void with its own proposition.

The danger is that the UK is again being outmanoeuvred by an EU that wants to settle fish first (an area where the UK potentially holds cards). Its only real demand beyond fish is a youth mobility deal – which the UK seems to have rejected in principle, despite having such deals with a number of other countries – which the EU wants to come with an expensive price tag on student fees. In other areas the mantra remains as before – no “cherry picking”.

Meanwhile the UK has talked in generic terms about a veterinary deal, something for touring artists and recognition of qualifications, and possible alignment on chemicals – though without putting forward concrete proposals. In Brussels, Reeves pointed to the risk of future barriers – not least as the UK and EU moved forward with their separate proposals to tax carbon at the border – raising potential big new frictions between the two.

The UK needs a clear EU and international economic strategy before the first UK-EU summit

The appointment of a lead official cannot come soon enough. They need to nail down the UK’s priorities, work out where the UK is prepared to go to accommodate EU asks and where the real red lines are that mean – to coin a phrase – no reset deal is better than the existing “botched” deal....

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