It seems the talks are making "good progress "according to Commission president Ursula Von der Leyen and are boiling down to the level playing field stuff and fishing. This comes from a tweet (below) by Nick Gutteridge, a Brussels based reporter for The Sun. He claims that she has said she is in contact with Barnier on "an hourly basis" which seems incredible to me. Another reporter claimed to have called a senior MEP only to be told to call later because he was expecting a call from Barnier. I assume the EU chief negotiator needs to keep the European parliament onside and he is probably checking what leeway he has (answer I think, not much), It's all very interesting.
Here's Gutteridges's Tweet:
EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen says Brexit talks are 'making good progress' and are now 'boiling down to the two topics that are the most important - Level Playing Field and fisheries'.
— Nick Gutteridge (@nickgutteridge) October 29, 2020
I assume when an announcement comes the sequence will be much like the UK-Japan trade deal, first hailed as a triumph, next as not much more than the status quo and then that Japanese companies will see 83% of the expected growth in exports - this is according to an official impact assessment accordng to the FT. It's like watching something going rotten and seeing it speeded up.
For the ERG it will go along the lines of the WA, initially greeted as a symbol of Britain's tough negotiating stance before deciding it's so bad it must go. Johnson's feet are turning to clay before our eyes.
However, I wanted to point you towards a book review. This is one in The Scotsman and it's Tom Bower's book on Johnson. Bower has made a name for himself doing hatchet jobs on political figures, including Tony Blair, but he's known Boris Johnson for years and can't quite bring himself to do the same with him.
The result is a flawed book. The reviewer, Joyce McMillan says:
"In this latest massive study of Boris Johnson, though - perhaps his first attempt at a subject he finds truly sympathetic - it becomes increasingly difficult to detect the boundary between Bower the investigative journalist, and Bower the admirer and polemicist; as he delivers a detailed account of Johnson’s political career that faithfully records all the criticisms regularly made of his subject - the laziness, the lack of interest in detail, the compulsive lying and opportunism, and his appalling treatment of women - while never allowing those criticisms to influence his evident strong attraction to Johnson, both as a human being, and as a pro-Brexit Conservative politician."
Instead, the hatchet job is done on Johnson's enemies, from "Barnier to the entire Foreign Office" who Bower sees as the malign opponents of what he calls Johnson’s “intelligent patriotism.”
I confess I don't know what "intelligent patriotism" is but I don't think Johnson is either intelligent or patriotic. Nobody who was would ever think of advocating Brexit, let alone driving it through in the middle of a pandemic. He is patriotic in the same way as Adolph Hitler. I would say he is stupidly xenophobic.
McMillan says:
"Bower writes throughout as if the bizarre world inhabited by Johnson and his contemporaries in London politics and journalism – a world so small, so incestuous, and so riddled with nepotism, cronyism and unearned privilege that it almost beggars belief – actually is what it imagines itself to be, both the epicentre of British life, and some kind of legitimate representation of it. It is remarkable to watch Bower faithfully chronicling all this without much objection; and with barely a word about the 66 million lives, across Britain, that stand to be profoundly damaged by these people, and their relentless, self-absorbed political game-playing."
It is I believe an accurate description of Johnson who has surrounded himself with a narrow band of sycophants, Bower included, who lavish praise on him for his "intelligence" when every decision he has ever made has proven to be wrong. They seem seduced by his upper class vowels and Eton education but anyone with an ounce of intelligence can see he's already a 'profoundly damaged' man who is stupid in several languages, at least one of them dead.
No, the more Brexit goes on the more convinced I am that within a few months the great majority of people in this country will realise they have been conned - and they will be very angry indeed. Pity Boris Johnson then.
