In June 2016 the British people were offered a simple “stay-or-go” choice over their 43-year membership of the European Union. It was a binary decision and the British people voted to leave. That was the easy part. As the story narrated in this book attests, transforming that high-level political decision into a practical reality has proved to be an agonising learning experience. For most of those five years I was a Brexit beat reporter, my ear pressed to the keyhole of the negotiating rooms that Stefaan De Rynck describes, earwigging the discussions that would shape the UK's new relationship with the EU. What is striking, for all the wealth of anecdote and insight De Rynck provides about the talks with the UK, is that Michel Barnier and his team spent more time talking to EU governments than to the UK. This built a united front against London that, for all Britain's diplomatic efforts to expose divisions in the EU, was never cracked.

This observation will no doubt infuriate some Brexiters. They will read this book and find their earnest belief that Brussels has been unbearably “smug”, “rigid” and “intransigent” during these negotiations to be fully justified. Who can forget Barnier's response when asked about Boris Johnson's remark that Brussels could “go whistle” for its Brexit divorce bill? Barnier observed that he could not hear any whistling, “just the clock ticking”. Such French insouciance was enough to bring English blood to the boil. And yet the fact is, despite Johnson's rhetoric, the UK paid the bill. Just like – after similar bouts of breast-beating and table-banging – it accepted the EU's timetable for the exit talks; the border in the Irish Sea; a deal on fishing rights and a so-called “level playing field” commensurate with the low-ambition trade deal it eventually signed.

For that is the story of the Brexit negotiation: the consistent and steady application of leverage in Brussels to achieve carefully predetermined negotiating aims. The outcomes speak for themselves. Too often the UK, as De Rynck pithily observes, “played a game of chicken, by itself ”. It remains one of the great ironies of Brexit that the same UK politicians who spent decades deriding the EU as legalistic and bureaucratic should have ever expected EU member states to be sentimental when negotiating the UK's departure.