Any hope that this week's EU summit will mark any sort of progress has long gone. Now everyone will be looking to the 6th July, the day when the full cabinet meets at Chequers to finally decide our position on the future relationship with the EU. The hope is that the twenty or so cabinet members will be able to make up their minds on the most important question facing this country - that is our post Brexit destination. This will be fifteen months after we embarked on the journey. We have been utterly becalmed so far.
The PM has committed to publishing a white paper in July setting out what the UK wants out of the trade agreement so I assume something will be decided at Chequers. However, this report by Robert Peston (HERE) at ITV is sceptical that anything will be settled:
"And when it comes to execution of those hopes, the full cabinet - 25 full members, plus 6 other ministers who also turn up - is being asked to adjudicate on what kind of customs relationship we want to negotiate with the EU, and the substance of how and whether rules and regulations for business converge or diverge from the EU's rules and regulations.
"That is the equivalent not-so-much of herding cats but of asking our feline friends for a definitive ruling on the origin of the universe.
"In other words, it is not a model of optimal practice in the dialectic of making tough but important choices".
Peston thinks we will still be a full member of the EU on March 30th next year. And this is really all because of the delays in resolving the central question of how close to the EU we want to be after Brexit. It has been avoided for so long, ever since the day the referendum was promised in 2014. Brexiteers have had almost four years to come up with an answer to this conundrum and have failed to produce any realistic plan.
We are still trying to find some mythical middle ground between IN and OUT. We don't want to be IN but can't face the cost and consequences of being OUT.
Now is the time for hard choices. Don't hold your breath - and when the white paper appears we will see an array of cake that will make the GBBO look like a Weightwatchers advert. Will the EU be tempted? I doubt it.
