The Brexit crisis is cracking the veneer of solidarity among European leaders

While all parties would probably agree to bring forward the deadline if a deal were ratified, the specifics of what that would look like complicates matters

For the past three long years the institutions and member states of the European Union have displayed a remarkably united front towards the UK on Brexit. Despite some fairly blatant attempts by the British to “divide and rule”, to call in favours and recruit friendly states such as the Netherlands and Sweden for the cause, what we might call the Barnier Line has held firm.

Now, almost without the prime minister’s intervention, some cracks are appearing in the edifice of European solidarity. Most significant, they are forming between Paris and Berlin on the best way to handle the chronic failure of the British to formulate a national policy. On the whole, it is good news for Remainers.

To put it at its crudest, the French president, Emmanuel Macron, has been more or less publicly pushing for a hard line against the British. Equally clearly, the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, has been a model of tolerance and patience. Hence Mr Macron’s enthusiasm for seeing the British off the premises as soon as possible, with the shortest of extensions to Brexit. Hence also Ms Merkel’s belief that there is really no huge hurry.

Thanks to their economic power, it will probably be the Germans’ tendency to indulge the British that will prevail. Mr Macron will be able to specify conditions and safeguards as he wishes; but future extensions should not be ruled out. Ms Merkel, to adopt a British expression, seems to want to allow the British Leavers enough rope with which to hang themselves.

While neither side has ever (formally) wanted the British to leave the club, the distinct impression is that the French are less upset about the departure than the Germans are. For Mr Macron, Britain’s historic resistance to European federalism – it dates back many decades – is a substantial obstacle to his ambition to see “More Europe”, an integrationist agenda to remedy, for example, the flaws in the euro system.

For the Germans by contrast, and in league with the Dutch and the Scandinavians, the British were invaluable allies in the resistance to headlong federalism, and the kinds of schemes that gave the European project a bad name among the voters. They could be again, were they to change their minds. In this ambition for a more free-market, competitive, pragmatic Europe, the northern Europeans are obviously at odds with Mr Macron, a young leader with a curiously old-fashioned view of the future of the European Union – much more Monnet than De Gaulle.

The new populists of Italy and the eastern countries, though maverick, also favour a Europe of nation states with independent migration policies – a world away from Mr Macron’s ideas. For all of these EU member states, a Europe that has Britain as another counterweight to France is preferable to one where its influence is absent.

More immediately, Ms Merkel has been convinced of the need for patience because of what she has seen for herself on her recent visit to another member state – Ireland.

The Irish say, rightly, that a border between the republic and Northern Ireland is unthinkable for obvious political historical and economic reasons. The 310 miles of meandering frontier that crosses roads, lanes, fields, barns, farmyards, lakes and rivers is notoriously porous.

Even during the Troubles it was impossible for the British army to control it. Under a no-deal Brexit this would be the European Union’s back door onto the rest of the world. A few besieged customs officers – if either the British or the Irish dared post them – would be all that stood between the integrity of the EU single market and its derangement.

In the absence of the much vaunted technological alternatives to a border on the island of Ireland, the British cannot under any circumstances be permitted to leave without a deal, as far as the EU can influence things. Hence Michel Barnier’s implication that if there is a no-deal Brexit, it would be entirely a decision by the UK and the UK alone. He too knows that the new act of parliament piloted through by Yvette Cooper makes this a virtual impossibility anyway. The Cooper Act, as it should be known, has outlawed no-deal Brexit; and the EU is determined that it will not impose one.

Ms Merkel seems prepared to wait as long as it takes for the penny to drop in London that this is in fact the case. She has also come to the considered view that a hard border in Ireland is unthinkable and that a no-deal Brexit is therefore also unthinkable (and that the Irish backstop is a red line).

Mr Macron will win concessions – some freely offered by Ms May, to be fair to her. She will agree to play nicely in the EU playpen for as long as the UK remains – and offer any guarantees the EU would require to bind her successor to do the same. There will be no vandalism of the EU’s budget plans by Boris Johnson. The UK will take its seats in the European parliament. The political facts on the ground are moving heavily against Brexit.

Mr Macron may also succeed in shortening Donald Tusk’s one-year “flextension”, perhaps specifying first June and then the end of 2019 as new deadlines. That, however, might force all concerned to a never-ending cycle of deadlines, and turn their Christmases to misery; so a date in 2020 would still be more realistic if they want to avoid an emergency trip to Brussels on Christmas Day.

All parties will also be happy to sign up to the idea that the deadline can be brought forward in the event of a miraculous British ratification of a deal; or of the EU rapidly consenting to new British proposals.

Where Mr Macron is right to be impatient and dictate to terms to the British is in asking them for some sort of plan to resolve the crisis. Chancellor Merkel, however, is the shrewder in discerning that time, and lots of it, will be required to allow the British to end their agonies and come to their senses.

After all, it would take some months to organise a people’s vote; and without that, the Brexit crisis will continue indefinitely.