On 14 October M. Macron, the French president, and Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, met in Paris for one of their regular bilaterals. Also present were senior EU officials, including some associated with the Brexit negotiations. Speaking in confidence to a British official he knew to be an SIS officer, one of those present reported a conversation between the French and German chefs de cabinet in which the latter proposed that if the British were to increase their offer on the so-called divorce payment to halfway between the current level and what the EU is demanding, then the German and French governments should ensure that the EU accepted it. The French chef de cabinet agreed that that should be their joint position.

Source was confident that this would become the agreed position between the two governments but did not know whether the EU negotiators had yet been instructed to compromise.

That would read well enough, horse’s-mouth stuff with direct access and bang up to date. It would play to the government’s default position, which seemed to be to compromise and then compromise again, and it implied the actual cost of a deal, something hitherto only guessed at. Whether to offer that amount or not would be a political decision but ministers would at least feel they knew the EU’s real thinking. It would give them time to prepare Parliament and the public for a settlement costing the country far more than they had originally suggested but also significantly less than the EU’s public demand. It would be the kind of compromise familiar to anyone who had bought a house or car and it could be made to sound reasonable. It would also save the taxpayer billions.

But it couldn’t be trusted, not fully. There was less to it than met the eye. When he had asked Timber Wolf why he was there the response – that he was part of the team sent along to provide technical briefing if required – was too vague and too off-pat to be convincing. It was also at variance with what he had previously told Gareth – that he had nothing to do with the negotiating team but was responsible for long-term strategic thinking. And there was no context to the German chef de cabinet’s alleged remark – did it come out of the blue or was it part of a discussion of the negotiations? If so, what had preceded it? Its status was also unclear. Did it reflect German government thinking, or existing joint thinking with the French, or was it speculative political musing that hadn’t been translated into policy and might never be? Or was it merely the personal opinion of the speaker and did the French official, in nodding, indicate agreement, or was he merely acknowledging that he’d heard it? And if it was a serious proposition, was anyone actually doing anything about it?