It’s just not cricket, old boy. There’s many a slip twixt gully and wicket-keeper – or backstop.
“Barnier just doesn’t get it,” complained Raab. “He wants the gloves to come off, which is bad news for a wicket-keeper. He took his eye off the ball there.”
There’s also a lot of confusing talk about borders. “Yes, that’s another area where I had to put Michel right,” confirms Raab. “It’s actually called a boundary, and it’s made of rope. So all this talk about hard borders and soft borders is really a load of nonsense.”
The proposed border – or boundary – checkpoints is another non-issue, according to Raab. “The umpire’s decision is final,” he said. “The only technological solution you need is a TV camera to check whether the ball touched the rope. I told him that. It knocked him for six!”
Raab revealed how progress in the Brexit talks were progressing. “It’s two hours of cut and thrust,” he said. “Then you stop for lunch. Then two more hours. Then a tea break. Then two final hours, shake hands, and all down the pub to get bladdered! The whole thing takes up to five days, and if there is no result, you call it a draw.”
And the finer points of negotiation are finally clarified. “When you are in, you go out, and when you are out, you go in,” explained Raab. “That’s how cricket, I mean Brexit, works.”
The latest test had been a long drawn out, attritional affair. “Captain May is still at the crease!” claims Raab. “She is batting for Britain. No balls, that’s Barnier’s problem, no balls.”
The situation is finely poised. May is playing for time, trying to avoid defeat against Barnier’s straight and accurate deliveries. But there is a break in play while Barnier insists on having a backstop, and May is reluctant to allow it, whatever the rules say.
It looks like Brexit may have to be decided by the Duckworth-Lewis method.