(paywall) Booker: This Brexit deal has merely lengthened the fuse of the inevitable time bomb
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2017/12/16/brexit-deal-has-merely-lengthened-fuse-inevitable-time-bomb/
Even greater mayhem will erupt when the issues punted into ‘phase two’ come home to roost
Twice in a week we have been treated to euphoric claims about how well Theresa May’s approach to Brexit is now going down with her EU colleagues,
But one must wonder whether our own politicians have all decided to take to heart that recent comment on his job from David Davis: 
“I don’t have to be very clever. I don’t have to know very much.”
Behind all the fluff and wishful thinking, do any of them have any real idea even of where we have got to so far,
let alone where we may be heading for?
For a start, none of the three “Phase One” issues has yet been fully resolved.
The EU has made clear that by March it expects a legally binding agreement on all three, including that of the Northern Irish border,
on which Mrs May has not yet given the faintest clue as to how she thinks in practice this could be done,
The only other two issues yet on the table are that
Mrs May must explain, first, what she means by that “deep and special relationship” she keeps going on about;
and, second, the nature of those “transition” arrangements allowing us to remain in the single market for two or more years even after we leave the EU in March 2019.
The EU has made clear that this will require a very complex agreement which could take up to October to complete,
requiring the UK to meet all the legal and financial commitments it would entail, justiciable by the European Court of Justice.
When our politicians finally grasp that, during this “transition”,
we will still in effect be in the EU for two or more years after we have left it, without any power to influence its rules,
all hell will break loose.
Even greater mayhem will erupt when they realise that the EU’s rules cannot allow us to begin negotiating that even more complex “trade deal” until we have left,^^
possibly condemning us to spin on in that “half-in, half-out” transition stage for five years or more after we voted to do so.
Like David “I don’t have to know very much” Davis,
not a single politician seems yet to have woken up to just what a minefield all this is heading for.
To the rage of those of my readers who seem to understand as little of the facts as our MPs < but btl comments on his articles are shocking >
I can only repeat that,
if only Mrs May’s had not been reckless enough to decide that we should leave the European Economic Area,
95 percent of all these tortuous problems need never have arisen.