Well, well. The deal was so close last weekend but is now as far away as ever according to the usually unreliable Sun (HERE). Their political editor Tom Newton Dunn says the PM has "called the EU’s bluff by insisting there will be no Brexit deal at next week’s leaders’ summit unless it cedes major ground to her". There is a lot of news management going on here.
Newton Dunn, who is very close to Downing Street, says May is holding out for "a precise future framework” from Brussels over the shape of the UK-EU trade deal to avoid a ‘blind Brexit’. It has emerged that EU negotiators want to fob her off with a brief list of aspirations as short as three pages long".
"Laying down the quid pro quo, the spokesman said: “It is worth repeating that there can be no withdrawal agreement without a precise future framework.”
This is for Sun readers only so that when the EU produce a 15 page explanation of the future relationship the PM can show she got something. In fact it has already been reported in a paper produced in September by the Institute for Government: Brexit - six months to go (HERE page 5) that:
"The ‘future framework’, to accompany the Withdrawal Agreement, still needs to be agreed. There is currently no public statement of what this framework will look like, and how much detail it will go into. Michel Barnier told the German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung that it could fill 15–20 pages".
Note not three pages at all, but 15-20 and this from M Barnier himself. The Sun's report is pure expectation management by No 10. There will be a 15 + page summary of the future relationship and Theresa May's spokesman will then tell us the EU backed down. But it won't be true.
The Sun is always out of the picture and behind the times.
