SOME human stories are fundamental. Some plots are basic. Down all the generations of drama – along the long years of storytelling from Sophocles to River City – the author Christopher Booker argues there are just seven basic plots which lie behind all the tales we tell ourselves. Just seven, from the narratives of classic novels to the featherweight fare of daytime telly.

First, he says, there are the stories of “overcoming the Monster”. You know the kind of thing. Jaws. Beowulf battering Grendel’s mammy. Van Helsing staking Dracula out. Finally evicting Mrs Thatcher from Downing Street. In its most basic form, The Monster is a traditional horror show of talons, gums and tusks. But narratively? The Monster can be anything wicked which our protagonists find themselves at odds with.

Sometimes it is a fiend, sometimes a force, sometimes a fellow human being with malice in mind. Sometimes it is a political and economic union of 28 member states. But the Monster is mainly a symbol; a symbol of the Big Bad our heroes must overcome.

Next, Booker says, you have your rags to riches stories, which turn the economic order on its axis. Cinderella rises from her cinders. David Copperfield finally turns a penny.

Third come the Quests. Storylines of seeking and finding, of journeying and reaching , like Frodo Baggins toddling slowly towards Mount Doom and Odysseus’s long commute through the Dodecanese. This plot, Booker argues, is distinct from stories of “voyage and return”, when the protagonist steps outside of their everyday life, heads off on an adventure and returns quite altered by the experience.

There are the staples of comedy and tragedy, of course. But change is also the hallmark of the dramas of Rebirth – the seventh of Booker’s seven basic plots. Ebenezer Scrooge is redeemed by four phantoms. But what makes the drama of A Christmas Carol really work is the spiritual transformation at its heart, as the better and worser angels of Mr Scrooge’s nature duke it out for the money-lender’s soul. Well – it’s that or Kermit the Frog’s soulful performance as Bob Cratchit.

I’ve been re-reading The Seven Basic Plots lately because the news agenda seems to keep regurgitating Brexit headlines which erupt straight out of Booker’s checklist. Consider a sample from the weekend’s front pages. “May’s finest hour” barked the Express. Because the only historical reference point for anything is World War II, apparently.

“She’s spent months patiently working for a deal with the EU, only to be ambushed and insulted” reflected the Mail, characterising the PM’s speech as a “stirring riposte”. The Sun gave it “May’s Brexit fightback: UP EUrs!”. A picture, classically, paints a thousand words. Here, it shows Theresa May – dressed like a retired Ginger Spice – giving a bowman’s salute from the tops of the white cliffs of Dover. Britannia in full sail. Crikey.

Journalists are in the storytelling business. Politicians too. I don’t mean this in an excessively critical way. I’m not suggesting the stories we tell ourselves – and are told about ourselves – are all just fiction. We can’t avoid telling stories. But both politicians and journalists must perform a tricky double function.

Politicians must do unsexy, meaningful, complex things in the real world. Journalists need to describe these unsexy, meaningful, complex things. At their best, they also identify the unsexy, meaningful, complex ways in which our politicians fail to match up their aspirations with reality.

This means planting these facts in a story which gives these facts meaningful social currency.

Which requires telling stories capable of reaching the average punter on an intellectual and emotional level. A level which isn’t all over the European treaties.

A level whose understanding of World Trade Organisation rules are limited. Don’t believe me? Try drafting a Ballad of National Accounting. Or Ane Satire of the Four Freedoms of the European Union. Or the Tragicomedy of the WTO rules, with special reference to the most favoured nation status, and its implications for the soft fruit economy of rural Perthshire.

In reporting the Brexit negotiation process, the press’s appetite for human stories has been striking. Faced with the bureaucratic nightmare of educating the electorate about what different strands of Brexit might mean – many hacks have gone white and retreated into the clichés of personality politics.

Nobody understands customs rules, but everyone understands being patronised or laughed at.

So if the Salzburg conference was a disaster for the Prime Minister’s negotiating strategy? It must be down to a clash of personalities. “Respect” must be the issue, as opposed to the UK Government’s irreconcilable demands and muddy sense of its own priorities. This Tory psychodrama is an escapist fantasy.

Tim Shipman, the political editor of the Sunday Times, is an impeccably well-connected reporter.

A Westminster lobby correspondent able to bend the ear of cabinet ministers and backbenchers alike, Shipman is fashioned by nature and circumstances to be the indispensable bard of the Brexit community.

If you enjoy tittle-tattle about how ambition, charlatanry and half-baked ideology can get its way in politics – then All Out War: The Full Story of Brexit is for you.

Shipman is unpretentious. He knows what he is – and isn’t – about. His book doesn’t try to be a sociologically nuanced disquisition on the main factors which resulted in 2016’s Brexit vote.

The only society it is squarely rooted in is the square mile of the Palace of Westminster. Shipman is a master of what the Americans would call “inside baseball”. I’m sure folk who read it from the index forward enjoyed it well enough.

But as late summer reading goes, it made me feel deeply ambivalent. Much of the subsequent Brexit coverage has taken its prompt from Shipman’s story of the clash of personalities, and their betrayals and backstabbing.

Ghouls and boggarts like Boris Johnson and Jacob Rees-Mogg serve a powerful distracting function in British politics. The fixation on these figures – and their manoeuvres and agitations – suggest the challenges of Brexit can be reduced from the systemic to the personal. They can’t.

Supporters of Brexit find themselves in perhaps the most uncomfortable place of all. Enthusiastic backers of Britain’s departure from the EU know that it works seamlessly in the land of a thousand fables.

But back in our reality? Goldilocks has drowned in her porridge. The Three Little Pigs are blaming the Poles for falling house prices. The Three Bears have overdosed on sleeping pills. The woodsman accidentally put his tomahawk through Little Red and is now fretting about European supply chains for his lumber.

Actuarially speaking, the Big Bad Wolf probably does resemble your granny, and is almost certainly howling at the moon.

Stories are a comfort. Stories are a welcome distraction. Stories at their best can be a way of seeing the moral balance of the world more clearly, to see through other people’s eyes.

But stories can also muffle unwelcome realities we don’t want to experience. Stories can be an escape. Much of the political reporting of Brexit remains escapist.

Pick your plot. Pick your side. Pick your monster. Rags to riches, a tragedy or a comedy. A national voyage into a brighter future, or a return to some imagined home.

Read the Brexit reporting through this lens – well, read it and weep.