Earlier this afternoon, David Cameron cheered everyone up by saying that Britain had halved its £1.7 billion bill to the EU.
And George Osborne released his own statement saying that the government would pay "£850m total".
He also said this, just to make things absolutely clear.
As PM said EU bill unacceptable. Now we've halved the bill, delayed the bill & pay no interest on the bill. Result for Britain
People were pretty impressed. The bill came at a particularly bad time for the government and for a while it looked like there was no way out.
Great work by @George_Osborne to half the bill at the EU with no interest and change future laws. Reform is possible so we can stay in.
EU caves in to UK, forced by Osborne's brilliant negotiation to let us pay half of our bill much later with some other bits of our own money
And the prime minister had already shown that he was pretty angry with the way the bill was presented to him.
But then Bloomberg published an article saying the UK had "failed" to cut the EU bill.
Attempting to clarify the situation, the Irish finance minister, Michael Noonan, told reporters in Brussels: "The UK will pay the whole amount without any penalties attached or interest rates. The instalments will be paid over a period of time."
So what exactly changed – and what did David Cameron and George Osborne mean by their statements?
Firstly, the government will not have to pay the bill by 1 December 2014, as was initially threatened, but by September 2015, which can be seen as a victory of sorts.
Secondly, the bill will be interest-free.
Thirdly, although everyone initially thought that the total bill had been halved to £850 million, that's since been determined to be false. Instead, it would be fair to say that the government will have to directly pay £850 million.
So what about the the other £850 million? The EU will still get that money from Britain but it won't come from the government directly; the EU will take the money from a rebate that Britain expected to receive.
Breaking that down, typically "the UK receives a rebate on their contribution" to the EU, according to the EU budget commissioner, because it has paid too much. According to The Guardian, Britain's rebate was expected to knock £850 million off the demand for £1.7 billion. This money will now be returned to the EU in September.
And the pro-EU reform think-tank Open Europe has written in a blog post: "Osborne [is] right on the amount but may be exaggerating the extent of the concession."
A spokesperson for the Treasury told BuzzFeed News that the broad difference is that the European Commission is going to separately apply the formula normally used to calculate the UK's annual rebate to this specific one-off payment.
And then everyone tried to figure out just what on earth was going on.
Meanwhile, the Tories said Britain would initially not have received a rebate and so they delivered on their promise.
@BrunoBrussels rebate was not part of original Baroso commission proposal. We have insisted on it and delivered
Except it turned out that a rebate had been mentioned.
@ToryTreasury hmm Polish commissioner said rebate of at least 500m would apply last week - Mon 27 Oct
And then the shadow chancellor dipped in and accused the government of taking "people for fools".
Cameron & Osborne are trying to take people for fools. They've failed to get a better deal for taxpayer http://t.co/nxgF2uNMiO
Not a single penny's been saved for the taxpayer compared to 2 wks ago when Cameron was blustering in Brussels http://t.co/nxgF2uNMiO
A Tory MP told The Spectator: "There will be those who go around for the next few days saying that Osborne is still a pussy and he should have said that they can take us to court."
So what's the situation now? We've got some journalists saying there's been no reduction in the bill.
Draft text on #UK 𠫂.1bn says countries can pay "no later than 1 September" 2015. @George_Osborne gets his delay, but not his bill reduction
So what's the situation now? We've got some journalists saying there's been no reduction in the bill.
A Tory Twitter account saying the chancellor and prime minister have managed to increase the typical rebate the UK would receive.
And EU finance ministers saying nothing has changed.
Three EU finance ministers (Dijsselbloem, Noonan and Schelling) saying UK will pay full surcharge.
The British public have been left clueless, arguing among themselves about exactly what's going on. This is what's happening underneath David Cameron's Facebook status:
Still with us? Then feel free to calculate the UK's rebate using the formula:
Here's the formula for calculating the UK's rebate from #EU budget if someone wants to have go....