When Hamish Falconer, the UK's new chief Brexit negotiator under Andy Burnham's government, described his EU reset mission in The Guardian on 10 August 2026, he made a striking distinction: negotiating with the Taliban had been an adversarial exercise, but negotiating with the EU was a negotiation 'with friends, with whom we share our values'. Same negotiator, radically different operating logic. That contrast is exactly what most PMOs miss when they try to run distributed ex
