“It’s taken us a week to work out just how clever you Brits are,” said negotiator Hans Upp. “We thought it was just a bit stupid, like ‘Banana means Banana’, but at last the pfennig has dropped.”

The Dalai Lama has been reported as saying “Brexit Means Brexit is pure zen. Meditating upon it is the way to true enlightenment.” It appears that Upp and his team have been doing precisely that.

While our slow-witted European counterparts have been gradually enlightening themselves, the British negotiators have simply laid back and thought of the Queen. This course of action has been recommended by both Philip May and, naturally enough, the Duke of Edinburgh.

“There is a rare beauty in the phrase Brexit Means Brexit,” a startled Herr Upp continued. “The word Brexit alone is meaningless. But by meaning absolutely nothing, it manages to encapsulate absolutely everything. It is pure poetry. There is simply no answer to it. We are going to be complete pushovers for David Davis and his team now.”

The tautological statement has given rise to a new brand of thought, dubbed “meta-post-structuralism” by French philosopher Didier Noyu, in which the simple truth contained within a word is revealed by repetition. Certain elements of the British press have recently adopted meta-post-structuralism as a persuasive device. Coincidentally, Prof Noyu is the Daily Mail’s Brexit correspondent.

Further evidence is given by mathematician Perry Meter. “It is well known that repeating an operation inverts it: two negatives makes a positive. In the case of Brexit Means Brexit, two nothings makes an infinity.”

With this leap of intellectual boffinry on our side, Brexit cannot be anything other than a roaring success. It is fortunate that our friends in the EU have cottoned on so quickly, as it is believed that Britain’s back-up tactic was for Theresa May to say “I’ll thcream and thcream until I’m thick,” before running away and wantonly destroying Brussels’ crops.

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