After the briefing one "senior EU diplomat" said:
“I do have the impression that the finalisation of the legal texts is beginning but there is no breakthrough on the famous three points.
“We must now come up with contingency measures. January 1 is getting close, we need a safety net. Of course this sends out a political signal. But we have a business community that we want to tell in good time what to do.”
The diplomat suggested that the publication of the no deal plans could concentrate minds in London adding that it was now clear there will be disruption on 1 January, the only question being how much.
I suppose having spent the best part of a year trying to make Johnson and his government see sense there is not much else they can do. You can't stop someone jumping off a cliff if they really want to and perhaps the best approach is the shock of saying OK, go ahead. I don't believe he will do it.
I noticed the other day a quote from Andrew Gimson, who wrote a biography of Johnson ‘Boris: The Making of the Prime Minister’(2016):
“Boris has a much higher tolerance of risk than most people, including most politicians. He sometimes likes to let things run with a kind of belief that they will somehow work themselves out,”
And this from another biographer, Sonia Purnell, who worked with Johnson in Brussels for The Telegraph and wrote a biography of him; Just Boris: A tale of blonde ambition (2011):
When I worked with him all those years ago, I realised that this was not a kind of normal person, with normal feelings of empathy."
It is I think obvious it is all a big gamble to the prime minister, who doesn't give two hoots for anybody else, the Tory party, the nation or the EU and is apparently prepared to risk everything including the destruction of entire industries and along with them the livelihoods of thousands of people to achieve something he doesn't really believe in anyway.
Johnson would have been equally capable and equally successful in arguing for Britain to remain in the EU in 2016. I think we all know this. His whole life has been about risk taking and laughing off the consequences. It's hard to remember anything he's done well - apart from 'selling' one mad idea after another.
But with Brexit, he gambled on it not making much difference either way and was swayed by the arguments of Brexiteers and his own warped ambition to succeed Cameron as PM. I honestly don't think he understood the massive disruption of Brexit or the cost. He backed the wrong horse in 2016 and it is about to fall at the next fence.
His other failing is wanting to be liked which for a politician is fatal. He does not want to be remembered as the prime minister who broke the nation - in every sense - and in the end he will pull back and hope that things will "somehow work themselves out."
What he does in the next few days will be crucial. He either makes concessions and faces the wrath of the ERG and much of the modern Tory party, or he presses on with no deal and destroys the country. You would have thought the choice was obvious but it isn't.
Nonetheless, my opinion is that in the end reality will prevail.
