It was a familiar image, a classic hostage situation: two individuals seated side by side, one grey-faced and silent unless spoken to, the other confident, expansive and garrulous. Familiar, too, was the relationship depicted in this vignette: one party a high-ranking European Union official, the other a negotiator from a non-EU country. How often have we in Britain witnessed that set-piece ritual of humiliation, with an EU apparatchik dictating terms, de haut en bas, to the rabbit in the headlights apologetically representing the UK?
