IT’S standard to begin any negotiation by adopting a maximalist position. You demand the moon before grudgingly – accompanied by much sighing and frowning – letting the other side bargain you down to just the Sea of Tranquility. You then leave the table with a triumphant cackle; this, of course, is what you wanted all along. Who needs the hassle of looking after a whole moon?

Know what you want, what you can realistically get, and what you’re willing to give up to get it. You can bet your opponent does. It’s how the EU has approached the Brexit discussions. Britain, meanwhile, is providing future students of tradecraft with an almost cartoonish case study in incompetence.

We’re behaving like a cocky schoolkid on work experience in a used-car showroom, swaggering around in an ill-fitting suit borrowed from our dad, putting on the patter until we’re asked a question we can’t answer, poker-faced until our bluff is called and we’re forced instantly to fold. To put it simply, we don’t know what we’re doing. Theresa doesn’t know. David doesn’t know. Liam doesn’t know. Boris, for all his long-winded speeches, knows least of all. This bodes ill for a country that will soon need to cut a series of sharp global deals to keep the post-Brexit wolves from the door.

READ MORE: Big business welcomes Jeremy Corbyn’s call for post-Brexit customs union

There was always going to be a degree of fudge and fog around the UK’s positioning, given the closeness of the referendum result. The electorate remains split fairly evenly between Remainers and Leavers, which makes it all but impossible for the Government to take a hard and fast position that will satisfy a reasonable majority of people. Without a parliamentary majority, the Prime Minister is pulled between the Rees-Moggites, who now effectively demand we cut all ties to the EU and, like pin-striped Vikings, strike out for unfamiliar new shores, and the substantial chunk of her MPs who see this as abject lunacy.

But if you necessarily govern in shades of grey, you oppose in primary colours. The failure of Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour to lead a big, bold battle against Brexit meant the Remain campaign was, to borrow from Geoffrey Howe, like a batsman arriving at the crease only to find his bat had been broken by the team captain.

Mr Corbyn wanted Brexit, be in no doubt about that. The hard left sees the EU as a capitalist stitch-up, a tool for neoliberals and multinationals to exploit the horny-handed sons of toil struggling to make ends meet in their Islington townhouses. These people never encounter a conspiracy theory without believing it, or a market without denouncing it. So it is with the EU. Labour sat on its hands, hugging ambiguity close throughout the referendum campaign, and all was lost.

The party’s moderates – still dominant on the backbenches, at least – have been working away at the leadership ever since. The hard-left Brexiters are relatively small in number and new to the demands of power. Their early absolutism has been somewhat diluted by Mr Corbyn’s surprise success in the last General Election. That brush with Downing Street means they are increasingly willing to put politics before purity – Blair-like, one might call it – if it gets them through the door.

And so the moderates have managed gradually to shift the party’s position, to the point where Mr Corbyn yesterday gave a speech that offered some red meat to Remainers and those who favour the softest of Brexits. “Labour would seek to negotiate a new comprehensive UK-EU customs union to ensure that there are no tariffs with Europe and to help avoid any need for a hard border in Northern Ireland,” he said.

READ MORE: Big business welcomes Jeremy Corbyn’s call for post-Brexit customs union

There are, of course, questions about how this would work in practice, but then literally every option on every side is fraught with difficulty and confusion. Labour’s position at least has the merit of an explicit commitment to maintain close economic relations with our biggest overseas market.

It’s cute politics, too. Labour has now put itself in a position to defeat the Government in Parliament should it seek to go down the Rees-Mogg route. It will almost certainly be able to peel off Tory rebels such as Anna Soubry, Ed Vaizey and others on issues such as a customs union. Nicky Morgan, the former Education Secretary and now chair of the influential Treasury Select Committee, published an article yesterday arguing in favour of a customs deal. “If the Government is determined to pursue a bespoke end-state agreement with the EU then an imaginative customs union agreement which means no hard border between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland is perfectly possible,” she wrote. “And it is something our sovereign Parliament should be discussing.”

A Tory split, which could bring down Theresa May’s administration, is no longer unthinkable. And you can tell the Brexit Ultras are alarmed by the direction of travel. They insist a customs union would prevent us striking new trade deals with all those wonderful countries that are going to fill the hole left after we quit the EU. The EU is nothing but a drag on our economic ambitions, they say.

The stats rather contradict them, though. Let’s look at China, generally held to be the most important future – if not existing – global market. As a member of the EU, Britain sends just three per cent of its goods exports to China, and the total annual value of trade between the two countries is around $84 billion. But Germany, bound by the same EU rules, has a $211 billion trade relationship with China. In fact, Germany is China’s number one trading partner, beating even the US. So it’s not EU membership that’s the problem.

READ MORE: Big business welcomes Jeremy Corbyn’s call for post-Brexit customs union

Meanwhile, the figures show Germany is already exporting less to Brexit-ready Britain – we have dropped from being its third biggest market to fifth, a trend that is expected to continue.

There are still many bruising battles ahead, but the momentum is back with those who want at the very least a soft Brexit, and who, like all sensible negotiators, are willing to compromise to achieve that. It didn’t look possible even a week ago, but perhaps a decent deal can still be struck.