Well, you've got me bang to rights there!
Or, as Churchill didn't say. 'diplomacy is the art of telling people to go to hell in such a way that they ask for directions'.
I, and others of my lowly ilk, would contest that the EU bent over backwards to frustrate the UK's attempts to leave the organisation, or to hold it firmly within its regulatory and governance orbit in what is an increasingly typical act of EU neocolonialism -they are keen to do the same with Switzerland, and were falling over themselves to do it to Ukraine prior to 2014. To that end it set the agenda (sequencing) then skilfully exploited the splits within the UK government, its own cosy relationship with Whitehall, and of course the greatest gift of all, the Irish border issue. The greatest gift, that is, if you take out the appalling ineptitude of the May government negotiating gambit. They were delighted with the dithering, the time-wasting, two years and then the three years, because all the while the UK government was tearing itself to shreds. Tick-tock, tick-tock, mocked M.Barnier all the while. It was classic divide and conquer, slow and systematic attrition. Credit to them, we were complete amateurs, when we weren't actual fifth columnists.
'We got rid of them. We kicked them out. We finally turned them into a colony, and that was our plan from the first moment'.