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The stage is set, the orchestra is playing and the spotlight is being trained on the main players. But as Boris Johnson and Ursula Von Der Leyen prepare for their first face-to-face talks on a Brexit trade deal, you could be forgiven that this production will be more a Christmas panto than a serious power play.
Is the whole UK-EU trade and security relationship hanging on by a thread? “Oh no it isn’t!” “Oh yes it is!’ Crucially of course, there are not one but two audiences watching and both the PM and the EU Commission president know they have to convince their own crowd they’ve won the day. The mark of a clever negotiation is allowing both sets of punters to go home with a smile on their face (or at least not as much of a frown as the other lot).
Pessimists will see the fact that Johnson and Von Der Leyen are having to meet in person on Wednesday as proof of just how far apart the UK and EU still are. Optimists with a more cynical bent may see the meeting instead as a choreographed device, not least because the EU knows Johnson needs a big, showy spectacle to hide any possible concessions he makes.
The PM has made a career out of portraying Brussels as the pantomime baddies and now he has a chance to finish off the performance. Similarly, some European leaders like Emmanuel Macron have recently benefited from attacking a perfidious Albion (or should that be perfidious Albino?) but may have to mute their mini-victories on fish or level playing field agreements.
Some on the EU side are wary of making more concessions on their side too, with the French in particular warning that a Brexit trade deal is for life, not just for a Christmas/New Year deadline imposed by London. The British panto tradition of boos, bawdiness and bad hair days may be met by more than a gallic shrug.
The EU, like many Brits, are left wondering just which character will Johnson play? Sporting a blond mop and a team of ministers who aren’t a threat to him, Snow White and the Cabinet Dwarfs has been running in rep for a while. Johnson’s Mayor of London record showed he could pull off the Dick Whittington role too, while his thrusting-fiftysomething-new-father performance suggests we could see Peter Pan hanging from an Olympic zipwire.
Yet it seems the PM’s panto part of choice right now must surely be that old English folk tale, Jack and the Brexit Beanstalk. Critics think he traded his country’s services industry for a handful of magic Brexit beans. By contrast, his admirers can picture him bravely raiding the Brussels giant’s house, nicking back the golden egg-laying hen and then chopping down the ties that used to bind Britain to the EU. All the while, shouting “She’s behind you!”
It’s true that there is unease among several Tory backbench Brexiteers that they may be being taken for a ride (the Chamberlain/Churchill meme is back), and that Johnson is preparing to give ground in key areas before dressing the whole thing up as a victory (just as he famously did in agreeing a border in the Irish Sea last year, before renouncing it later). There was something distinctly fishy about the way the PM held a photocall with a fishmonger in Uxbridge rather than a trawler in Grimsby today.
But with Keir Starmer never likely to oppose any deal (and in fact to my eye very likely to back one), Johnson can afford a few Conservative hardline rebels. Never forget that Brussels can count, and they can count what an in-built majority the government has without that Labour opposition.
No, if there is a deal to be done or not done, it will come down ultimately to Johnson. Yes there will be sherpas and officials, but this on him. He is the one who can authorise concessions or can stand firm. It may even be that in this Zoom-focused age of ours, the small talk in the margins, the back-and-forth of a real, live meeting could swing this momentous decision.
More than four years after his own central performance arguably delivered the Vote Leave cause, a year after his election victory built on getting Brexit ‘done’, Johnson must be relishing another stint in the limelight.
Still, what’s extraordinary is that even at this late, late hour, few can really predict which way he’s going to jump. Having spent a lifetime accused of opportunism, will he once again show an elastic relationship with his previous promises? Or will he gamble one more time, on a no-trade-deal? If the latter, it’s a gamble all of us have a stake in.