Brexit is done and also it will never be done. Rishi Sunak’s deal to fix the Northern Ireland protocol ends a process that is only beginning. If that sounds paradoxical it is because British politics uses the B-word to describe many things, or rather it confuses different things by pretending they are one.
Brexit was an insurrection against the status quo and a promise to upend the established ways of Westminster government. But Brexit is also a technical project and a diplomatic minefield that can’t be navigated without those old skills of establishment statecraft.
