The press were always going to frame the Brexit talks as a battle. We all find struggle compelling. When you listen to a debate you want to know who is the winner. When there is war on the victor is the one who claims the spoils. In sport, the excitement comes from the tension over who is going to come out on top (except golf). So a negotiation can be, and will be, seen as a battle of wills with one or other party winning and the other necessarily losing.
But a lot of real world negotiations aren’t like that at all. Trade deals have the aim of achieving a mutually successful outcome, and when they work both sides are the winner. There are times where the negotiation is one sided. So sometimes one party gets a disproportionate share of the winnings. But even where this occurs the trade is still preferable to no trade. The case of third world countries trying to get access to advanced markets is a good example. The richer party holds all the cards, and the poor one generally gets a poor deal. But it is still a better outcome than having nothing at all. Co-operation is a powerful tool that humans use to make their lives better.
The best analogy is the one that gets most used - who gets the biggest slice of the cake?
The case of Britain and the EU is a unique one in that it isn’t obvious what exactly the negotiations are about. Britain currently has a well established trading relationship with the rest of the EU that has grown up over decades and which has roots that go back much further. What exactly is the goal of breaking with the EU? This is something that the advocates of the break have not done a huge amount of explaining other than in negative terms. We know they don’t like the EU but quite what is so wrong about it isn’t discussed much.
So it really isn’t a question of winning or losing. If we don’t want the advantages the EU offers then we aren’t really losing the negotiations if we walk away from them. And likewise the EU isn’t really winning if we choose to do things in a way that doesn’t work to our own full advantage.
Just about the worst analogy is the one that compares it to buying a carpet in a bazaar. The worst case in that scenario is that you overpay for the carpet. But you do at least have the carpet at the end of it. A better analogy would be someone who storms out of their job after having an argument. Whatever the rights and wrongs of the argument the company is short of a worker and the worker is out of work.
So perhaps the cake analogy is the one to go for again. Early on Boris Johnson talked about both having the cake and eating it. That was of course a ridiculous notion. But while one cake cannot be both consumed and preserved - the law of conservation of matter is very clear on that point - it is possible to neither have it nor eat it. So the negotiations are in fact about exactly this. Just how much cake are we throwing away.
But where that analogy falls down is it is hard to see what the point of the British position is. And surely we wouldn’t turn up at a negotiation with no idea of what we want?
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