THE worst thing about the Brexit bourach is that there is no escape from it. The endless acronyms: EEA, EFTA, CETA, ESM. The Customs Union, Norway minus, Canada plus, bespoke access. The divorce bill that goes up and up. The metaphysical speculation about the existence or otherwise of the Irish border after Brexit. The abstruse debate about the jurisdiction of the European Court. The incomprehensible provisions of the Not-So-Great Repeal Bill with its Henry VIII Clauses. The pass-the-parcel repatriation of powers between Holyrood and Westminster. Millions of words, wantonly released into the public domain, yet nothing is ever resolved.

After 18 months, it just goes on and on: ad nauseam, ad absurdam, ad hysteriam. It's a bit like living with a delinquent relative who's too articulate to be sectioned but is clearly a threat to the stability of the household. Brexit should be classed as a form of psychological abuse, which is damaging our collective mental health and wellbeing. We need a Named Person to come along and cart the Prime Minister and what remains of her cabinet off for intense counselling in a secure therapeutic environment. It could happen. Theresa May is a woman on the edge of a nervous breakdown.

The Government is all over the place, and the Brexit press is getting desperate. That Daily Telegraph front page portraying Tory Remainer Rebels as if they were a gang of criminals wasn't as nasty as the Mail's “Enemies of the people” splash on the Supreme Court, but it did provoke widespread revulsion. And it didn't stop the rebellion. The Government says it will now “listen” to MPs’ objections to the “suicide pact” clause in the Withdrawal Bill that forces Britain to leave the EU, come what may, at the 11th hour on March 29, 2019. That climbdown was an important psychological moment. The Government's attempt to declare Brexit irreversible has now done the opposite. An exit from Brexit is no longer unthinkable.

As the December deadline for deal or no deal with the EU draws near, the air is filled with the sound of privileged groups heading for the lifeboats. The Financial Times reported that the Government has offered the City of London assurances that financiers will be exempt from restrictive immigration rules after Brexit. Money talks. Fish talk: the BBC reported that Grimsby, which voted heavily for Brexit, is now wanting a special deal to protect its fish processing industry. The leading Tory Brexiteer, John Redwood MP, who moonlights as an investment banker, has advised his clients to dump the UK.

As the economy slides into post-Brexit slump, our care-worn Prime Minister began the big cave-in to the EU terms, starting with the cash. Nigel Farage revealed that the UK Government has now quietly indicated to Brussels its willingness to pay the €50bn divorce bill for which the Foreign Secretary, Boris Johnson famously said that the EU could “go whistle”. So much for the £350m a week for the NHS. Here we are paying a huge wad in the hope of being allowed access to the single market which we have just left.

And it won't even do that. Leaked documents from the Commission revealed by Politico made clear that any payments will only tide us over the transition period until we formally leave the EU. Thereafter, the only thing that will be on offer, should the UK Government continue to reject the Customs Union and the rules of the European Single Market, will be a basic trade deal. Possibly along the lines of the Canadian CETA arrangement, which excludes services and consequently 80 per cent of the UK economy. We are over a barrel, here. No amount of cash will buy access to the single market.

The Cliff Edge tendency on the Tory benches hasn't given up hope of engineering an apocalyptic No Deal Brexit, after which Britain will be adrift on the sea of World Trade Organisation terms, which are considerably worse than the Canadian deal. But the Brexit Secretary, David Davis, seems to have been persuaded by British business lobbyists that severing relations with our biggest trading partner, complete with 1000 lorries a day stacked at Dover, is not a good look. So he assured business leaders in Berlin last week that there will be a transition period of around two years during which Britain will effectively remain in the single market. Does this mean Britain will remain under the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice (ECJ)? Davis waffled about a “mutually acceptable disputes resolution mechanism” but everyone knows what he is talking about is ECJ rule by another name.

This was another key moment in the post-Brexit reality check. The delusion that Britain could leave the European Union and yet retain privileged “friction free” access to the European Single Market has finally evaporated. Hard line Brexiteers told us that the EU would roll over and accept Britain's unilateral terms for access to the single market. That in order to sell their BMWs to Britain, the Germans would just agree to return a “bespoke” arrangement that allowed Britain to bend the rules. That was never going to happen.

David Davis complained last week that the EU is “putting politics before prosperity”. Brexit will cost everyone in the EU dearly, but as long as the economic cost is worse for Britain than for the rest of the EU, the 27 will suck it up. The EU has been putting politics first since the 1950s when the Treaty of Rome was signed. That was a kind of covenant by nations that had spent half a century fighting wars to create an economic entity that would make war impossible. They realised that the beggar-my-neighbour trade policies of the 1930s had prolonged the Great Depression and provided the foundations for extreme nationalism. Shoe-horning the fractious nations of Europe into one market, eradicating borders for people as well as goods, could not guarantee peace. But it would make fighting another war damned difficult.

Of course the 27 were going to drive a hard bargain for Britain: they have to to prevent the EU falling apart. If they had allowed friction-

free access to a country that didn't obey the rules of the club, then the single market would cease to exist. The idea that the EU would give up this security to accommodate the UK was always absurd, especially since the EU has just emerged from the sovereign debt crisis. To paraphrase John F Kennedy, the EU will pay any price, bear any burden to ensure the success of the European project.

The UK political classes have finally realised this, and so we are now in the business of trying to sneak back into the European Union by the back door, accepting all the conditions of single market membership by another name. David Davis is talking about Britain looking to the European Free Trade Association, EFTA, as a model for future relations with the EU. This places us essentially in the same place as Norway. We would be out of the EU but accept the rules of the single market over which we have no say. Brilliant. We spend all this money, create all this unpleasantness, drive everyone bananas just so we can rejoin the EU under worse terms than before.