“YOU’RE not going to negotiate when you have a gun on the table,” declared Maros Sefcovic, the top Eurocrat, after a majority of MPs this week backed in principle the Northern Ireland Protocol Bill.

Boris Johnson believes scrapping the bits of the Protocol he doesn’t like is legal because of the “doctrine of necessity” but virtually everyone else thinks it’s a clear breach of international law.

The European Commission Vice President said it was past time the UK Government abandoned its “chronic trend” of “unilateral surprises” and added to laughter: “You won’t hear this often from a European commissioner but it’s high time we got Brexit done.”

Earlier, Lord Frost, the ex-Brexit Minister, argued anyone who claimed Brexit had damaged the economy had an “axe to grind” and couldn’t be supported by any objective analysis of the figures, which showed the UK had grown at roughly the same rate as other G7 countries since the 2016 referendum.

In political terms, objectivity is the Holy Grail; it doesn’t exist.

Frost rubbished the numbers from the OBR, the Government’s independent forecaster, which suggested UK GDP would be 4% lower than if Britain had stayed in the EU’s embrace, branding them “zombie figures”.

And yet the statistical tide doesn’t appear to be flowing in Frost’s favour.

A report by the London School of Economics blamed post-Brexit red tape for a sharp drop of around a third in the UK’s number of trading relationships since January 2021.

The Resolution Foundation think-tank claimed Brexit would hit workers’ wages by some £470-a-year compared to what they would have been. It was also damaging Britain’s competitiveness. But Jacob Rees-Mogg, the Brexit Opportunities Minister, dismissed the analysis as a “regurgitation of Project Fear”.

On Wednesday, Andrew Bailey, Governor of the Bank of England, told a European Central Bank forum how UK growth would be weaker than our competitors because inflation would be higher and last longer here.

If true, it would confirm what economists have been saying that Brexit will entrench inflation and growth will be harder to achieve due to the post-2016 trade barriers and labour shortages.

The British Chambers of Commerce has urged the Government to review its shortage-occupation list to help firms keep moving. Currently, the lack of seasonal fruit-pickers is a big problem for farmers with crops going unpicked; food costs could go even higher this autumn.

UK ministers are coming under pressure to raise the 40,000 migrant work visa ceiling to alleviate post-Brexit shortages. They’re expected soon to raise it by 10,000.

Two and a half years on from Brexit, Sefcovic claimed it was becoming possible to disentangle its effects from those of the Covid-19 pandemic and the damage to UK-EU trade was “starting to show more clearly”.

Following the post-Brexit border controls, Eurostat figures show a 13% fall in UK exports to the EU from £144bn in 2020 to £126bn in 2021.

The UK-EU tariff-free Trade and Co-operation Agreement had increased paperwork, said Sefcovic, stressing how it could “not ever be a replacement for EU membership”.

Thus far, Downing St has set its face against instigating an impact assessment on Brexit, saying it would “not be straightforward” because of Covid’s lingering effects and the war in Ukraine.

But, nonetheless, Number 10 insisted the Government would “continue to realise the benefits of Brexit” and pointed to the new trade deals being signed as well as Rees-Mogg’s online “dashboard” showing how much EU law had been removed from UK statute books.

Last week, the Brexit Opportunities Minister confidently asserted there had been a “British-style revolution” of “marginal improvements” as he unveiled the new webpage.

Most people across the Brexit divide point to the UK’s vaccination programme as the most tangible positive of leaving the EU. But, according to the Commons Library, there have been just three new trade agreements; with Australia, New Zealand and Singapore. The former two have yet to come into force.

The Government hopes to conclude talks on Britain’s membership of the Trans-Pacific Partnership by the year-end and is in negotiations on new trade deals with several other countries like India, Mexico and Canada.

On immigration, while the number of EU workers has fallen sharply, there has been a rise in non-EU workers. To June 2021, the overall net migration figure was estimated to be 239,000.

Following the raft of dismal economic statistics, it should come as no surprise that an Ipsos poll suggested the number of Britons who felt worse off under Brexit was growing.

Last June it was 30%, now it’s 45%. Indeed, the number of Leave voters who believed they were worse off had more than doubled over the period from 10% to 22%. Only 17% said leaving the EU bloc had made their lives better, up from 10%.

Politically, the voices calling for a UK return to the single market are growing; albeit slowly.

After the former Conservative minister Tobias Ellwood last month raised the wrath of his Tory colleagues by suggesting it to ease the cost-of-living crisis, this week Sadiq Khan, Labour’s London’s Mayor, added his voice to the proposal. Hardly music to Keir Starmer’s ears, who has ruled it out; he needs those Brexit-supporting red wall seats to get into Number 10.

Equally, on the back of the stunning Liberal Democrat by-election win in Devon, party leader Ed Davey did everything he could to turn attention away from the Lib Dems’ visceral desire for the country to rejoin the single market and, eventually, the EU.

Given he wants his Europhile party to win lots of Tory seats in southern England, he can’t afford to scare soft Eurosceptic Conservative voters because the Lib Dems need their votes.

And yet. If the economy continues to falter through this decade compared to our continental neighbours, the Rejoiner tendency could begin to grow.

As the SNP want to make the 2024 General Election a de facto referendum on independence, the pro-EU lobby could look to make the 2029 one a de facto referendum on Brexit. Politics never stands still.