Jeremy Hunt poses in a maze. Behind him lurks the Brexit Minotaur | Jonathan Jones

The image of the foreign secretary with his EU counterparts looks comical at first, but there are dark echoes to it

The moment over the weekend when the foreign secretary, Jeremy Hunt, and his fellow European foreign ministers posed grinning and waving for a picture in the middle of a maze must have been one of those brief pauses of optimism in the Brexit process when a happy outcome seemed just a few laughing circuits of the greenery away – only for Arlene Foster or Jacob Rees-Mogg to appear at the next turn of the labyrinth with axe in hand and a determination to stay entrenched for ever and ever and ever.

A softly melancholic autumnal scatter of brown leaves across the emerald hedge-tops hints at winter closing in and the possibility – probability? – that the government’s cursed meanderings will leave Britain by the end of it completely and utterly lost. It was taken at Chevening, a country house in Kent at the prime minister’s disposal, which has a special association with the Foreign Office and whose maze is suggestive of a different age of elite diplomacy, when John le Carré’s George Smiley might have given his latest unsmiling account of the labyrinthine games of cold war espionage to a senior minister among these discreet walks.

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