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The true significance of Brexit Day is that it is not significant at all — it may be sad or happy, depending on your point of view, but as a moment it has little importance. And that may be

why the Johnson government is making fairly little of it, for its interests have shifted since December 12. Forget Project Fear, Project Betrayal or even Get Brexit Done. The most logical

slogan now would be Make Brexit Banal. The only thing that changes after today is that Britain no longer has a formal voice in European Union institutions. The trade and other negotiations

due to get under way in March will determine what else will change, on or after December 31, 2020. But the irony is that despite all his pro-Brexit bluster over the past three years, it is

now in Boris Johnson’s interest to make it appear as if very little will change then, either. Some of his decisions since arriving in No. 10 last July, and even since his electoral triumph

in December, seem to reflect this. On foreign and security matters, he has stayed close to the European line rather than aligning with Donald Trump: on Iran, for example, even after the

assassination of Qasem Soleimani on January 3; most recently on the use of Huawei equipment in 5G telecoms networks. His claims that goods passing between Northern Ireland and Great Britain

will require no border checks, despite his own Withdrawal Agreement saying that they will, also fits this: he prefers to argue that Brexit will make no real difference, which could mean that

in negotiations over future trade between the EU and Britain he will try to make sure that it doesn’t. Perhaps that is to take the prime minister too literally. There will be plenty of

pressure, whether from specific companies lobbying for easier rules, from Brexit fundamentalists in his own party or from nationalist editors at the _Daily Mail_, the _Express_, the

_Telegraph _and the _Sun_, to ensure that Britain takes a tough negotiating stance to defend its right to diverge from EU rules, so as to make 2020 the last year during which the UK is a

“vassal state”, as Johnson, echoing Jacob Rees-Mogg, once called it. Governments elsewhere in Europe, along with the EU negotiating team led by Michel Barnier, are girding themselves for a

confrontation over precisely this. But it is reasonable to doubt whether, in the end, the confrontation will amount to more than a brief period of posturing. Talk of another “cliff edge”, of

using the threat that Britain will walk away next December and join Afghanistan in just “trading on WTO terms”, may well be just talk. In fact, we might find such talk being suppressed

quite quickly. The reason is that the government, and Mr Johnson in particular, no longer needs to win the argument about whether or not Brexit is a good idea. It wants to win re-election in

2023 or 2024 by being able to boast that a strong economy has brought jobs and rising living standards to all regions of the country. To achieve that, the last thing it needs is to see

continued uncertainty holding back business investment, which is just what will happen during confrontational negotiations. A better approach will actually be to avoid there being one big,

make or break, negotiation at all. The EU anyway says it would be impossible to achieve such a negotiation in such a short period, and it is surely right. Far better to slice the issues up

into several different negotiations, making an agreement on some headline issues but most importantly agreeing upon a way to proceed while all the detailed, sectoral negotiations take place

over many years to come. One way this could be done is to exploit Article 24 of the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, which allows countries to agree to trade with each other on a

preferential (probably zero tariff) basis as long as they are moving towards a full free trade agreement with one another. This was often brought up during debate about the option of a

no-deal Brexit, but since it requires agreement by both sides it wasn’t actually apposite. Now it is apposite and it carries an extra advantage for Mr Johnson: it would allow him to extend

the “transition period” during which Britain remains subject to the rules of the EU single market without officially doing so, thus avoiding him breaking his previous pledge. By stringing

things out, the Article 24 approach would, if the EU agrees to it, allow the whole Brexit process to be re-labelled as merely something technical, something various clever boffins in

different ministries are dealing with while the government gets on with its real agenda: spending money on health and infrastructure, cutting taxes, rebuilding the military, or whatever else

its priorities turn out to be. The last thing Boris Johnson wants anyone to be asking, in 2023 or 2024, is “was Brexit a good idea or not?” He’d rather you’d got bored and moved on. He’d

rather you pay attention to all the things his government will have done by then that they could have done anyway, regardless of Brexit. He allegedly sent out an instruction after the

election victory saying that Brexit was not to be mentioned again inside government, and it is now being claimed that ministries are being told not to explain publicly what this year’s

“transition period” involves. Make Brexit Banal: that’s the new agenda.