As the EU finally ratifies the Brexit trade deal, attention shifts to some major loose ends.

Comments made by the Sir Kim Darroch, the British Ambassador to the US, on the Trump administration have been leaked to pro-Brexit journalist Isabel Oakshott, with key Brexiteers exploiting them to attack the civil service and diplomatic corps and call for the removal of non-Brexit-supporting civil servants.

'The French in the UK had a sense of being abandoned. They said, ‘yesterday we were Londoners and today we are foreigners’

The course of Brexit was set in the hours and days after the 2016 referendum. / It was at 6:22 a.m. on June 24, 2016 — 59 minutes before the official tally was unveiled — that the European Council sent its first “lines to take” to the national governments that make up the EU.

Economic hardship and war have not pushed Europe’s nations apart, but closer together.