No-deal Brexit: What could happen to travellers at midnight on 12 April

As midnight approaches on Friday 12 April, beware the Cinderella moments.

Imagine you are on an Easter holiday, driving along a French autoroute or Spanish autopista late in the Friday evening of what may now be “no-deal weekend”, 12-14 April. As the clock reaches midnight, your driving licence ceases to be valid in Europe. Should you be pulled over by the police, you had better be able to produce the right International Driving Permit (1968 version for France, 1949 version for Spain).

As Article 50 staggers to its slightly deferred appointment with destiny, many travel privileges would vanish (along with the hopes and dreams of millions of people) in what currently appears to be the default denouement.

You may believe that the no-deal option will work out fine in the end. But perhaps you will agree that the immediate consequences of Brexit will not be positive, and that leaving the European Union will have particularly profound implications for travellers.

Another Cinderella moment. Imagine you are an in-patient at a hospital in the “EU27,” being treated by the French or Spanish health service on the same basis as local citizens.

Again, after midnight on that fateful Friday your European Health Insurance Card (EHIC) becomes as impotent as your driving licence. The least-bad outcome is that the cost of medical care starts to rack up, rather than treatment being withdrawn until you can demonstrate your ability to pay.

You may recall that at a Brexit Select Committee session in June 2017, the last-but-two secretary for exiting the EU, David Davis, said he wanted EHIC benefits to continue beyond the UK’s departure.

Ironically, because so much time, talent, energy and resources have been squandered on what the prime minister calls “the political games and the arcane procedural rows” over Brexit, the UK hasn’t got around to negotiating a successor to the EHIC. This week the health minister, Stephen Hammond, said the government was merely “hopeful” that an agreement would be reached.

You need not look far for other potential Cinderella moments. Making a late-night mobile phone call from Italy at 11.55pm, local time, on 12 April?

After five minutes of free conversation thanks to the EU-wide ban on roaming charges, British travellers could find the cost rising by the minute as their mobile provider seizes the opportunity to revert to the bad old days of excessive fees for international calls.

And one more for the road: while the police are checking your motoring documents, they may also ask to see your passport – and, if it was issued 10 years ago or more, deem you to have breached the rules of the Schengen area.

Now, I do not expect any of these issues actually to come to pass over no-deal weekend.

In the event that the UK crashes out of the European Union, British travellers who inadvertently find themselves on the wrong side of the Channel (and history) are unlikely to be hunted down as instant outlaws.

This is not a Millennium Bug scare that could bring the travel world to a halt. The real damage will emerge only slowly, whether or not a deal is in place.

The UK will have fewer train, boat and plane links than would have prevailed had we stayed at the party, and perhaps a currency that is as much of a laughing stock as the country has become.

After a couple of years, some British travellers will be fleeced by online scammers as they search for the website for Etias, the “Euro-visa” that we will need as non-EU citizens.

Most regrettably, Britain’s diversity, prosperity and openness will diminish, along with its appeal to overseas visitors.

The more I watch with growing horror at what younger people presumably call “hashtag #WTF”, the more I am persuaded that Theresa May’s behaviour during the most baffling premiership in history must be because she is an ardent Remainer who has skewered her career and her party in order to avert the damage from the democratic decision reached in the EU referendum.

But experience suggests that the most likely cause of the disarray that is so deeply damaging the travel industry, and the rest of the nation, is not conspiracy but rank incompetence.