No European country is better understood in Brussels than Britain. Many European officials grew up adoring The Smiths or Manchester United, studied in the UK and now work mostly in English. So when Britain’s foreign secretary Jeremy Hunt compared the EU to the USSR, Brussels understood he was merely pandering to the Conservative party conference. That still didn’t satisfy Britain’s Polish and Baltic friends, who remembered the actual USSR. They had been trying to nudge Michel Barnier, the EU’s chief negotiator, towards generosity over Brexit. Now they won’t bother any more.

The UK’s conduct of Brexit has been a study in how to lose friends and alienate people (to borrow the title of Brexiter Toby Young’s memoir). The European Commission’s insistence on hammering into legal form every word of the “backstop” plan for the Irish border showed how trust had faded. Now that even the Brexit secretary and several other ministers have disowned May’s deal, which seems doomed not to pass parliament, trust has evaporated entirely. I visited Brussels and Ireland last week, and officials around Europe before that, trying to gauge whether the UK can restore trust.

Theresa May and her ministers embarked on Brexit almost devoid of personal relationships with their European peers. The counsellor to one continental prime minister told me that past British politicians (he cited Denis Healey) spent decades attending European talking shops, making friends. May’s lot didn’t, so they walk into European summits knowing nobody. Moreover, the counsellor said, no western European governing parties identified with the utopian-nationalist Tories, while the Corbynistas reminded them of 1970s splinter groups in their own countries.