Ursula von der Leyen must now be as baffled as Michel Barnier about the British position. The meeting between the two sides did not "go well" according to the BBC's Laura Kuenssberg and there was no meeting of minds or even a hint that the three hour meeting had pointed the way to a solution.
A statement issued by the VdL following the meeting said just this:
We had a lively and interesting discussion on the state of play across the list of outstanding issues. We gained a clear understanding of each other´s positions. They remain far apart. We agreed that the teams should immediately reconvene to try to resolve these essential issues. We will come to a decision by the end of the weekend.
One begins to sense that we are looking at brinkmanship on steroids - from both sides - with the endgame being simply a process where neither side wants to be seen pulling the plug although it looks a hopeless task.
Katya Adler, the BBCs Europe editor has a piece this morning which sums it all up:
"EU diplomats say the bloc is ready to go the extra mile during the next days of negotiations but contrary to the UK government view, the EU thinks the decision - deal or no deal - lies primarily in Downing Street."
Remember, last night's meeting followed two lengthy telephone calls between the two and nothing has come out of it. There has been no Varadkar moment. Yet the negotiators are to carry on negotiating - what? I don't know.
The EU side, according to the BBC, are "about to publish what it calls 'very narrow' contingency plans to keep planes in the sky and goods trucks on the road, in case of no deal."
As I mentioned at the top, the Commission president must be utterly baffled by Johnson and Frost. The UK rejects the idea of keeping up with EU standards over time - this agreement could stretch over decades and rules evolve over time. EU businesses will be forced, under EU law, to adopt those rules but Britain with tariff and quota free access will not. How can they accept that?
The answer of course is they can't - at all, ever, under any circumstances and no matter how long it takes to convince London of it.
The EU can't give us carte blanche and anything that might be regarded as a clause giving Brussels the right to retaliate if we offend, will be a sword of Damocles permanently hanging over UK foreign investment.
But all that isn't the oddest thing. I think the government has accepted a non-regression clause where we don't go backwards on standards, so it could be years before the EU push ahead with rule changes that impact on us or make us more competitive. We might even choose to follow some voluntarily.
So, it could be a long time, maybe never, before a disagreement arose. It would then go to binding arbitration, which we might win. If not we may have to pay a tariff on certain goods, maybe a narrow range of goods and only a small tariff.
But our sovereign choice is to begin to pay the maximum tariff on ALL goods right from the start. This is what no deal means in practice.
See? It is literally insane.
Phillip Collins, former speech writer to Tony Blair was on Newsnight last night and said he had spoken to many Tory MPs and ministers and asked what EU laws they're anxious to scrap and they just shrug. I have also struggled to see what regulations we are so desperate to avoid and apart from a few lunatics who want to scrap the Working Time Directive, I never see an official published list.
It leads me to conclude that having sovereignty is just jingoism. It's not the actual decisions themselves but who makes them that bothers the average Brexiter. I suspect if all the EU laws on the statute book had been dreamed up and passed by Westminster, nobody would bother in the slightest.
Now for a bit of irony involving Boris Johnson, the journalist. In 1993, working for The Telegraph he wrote an article as their Brussels correspondent which someone kindly reproduced on Twitter yesterday. The irony is that he met von der Leyen in the Berlaymont building, the one he told addled Telegraph readers 27 years ago was to be blown up:
BREAKING: Boris Johnson has left the Berlaymont building just twenty seven years after he wrote that it was about to be demolished. pic.twitter.com/p509jqIUGV
— Tom Peck (@tompeck) December 9, 2020
Johnson claimed the 17 commissioners and their staff were to be relocated to other rented EU buildings nearby and.
"Once they have all gone, which may not be before the end of the year, sappers will lay explosives at key points so that the structure can implode and subside gently. British sources suggested wryly that detonation day could be declared a national holiday."
It's true the building had a problem with asbestos (which had to be removed during renovation in the 1990s) but anybody who knows about asbestos knows you wouldn't demolish a building before removing it, otherwise the surrounding area would be covered in it.
I assume there was no truth whatsoever in the story but it's a mark of Johnson to write and believe such rubbish. This is the man who emerged from that very building last night and who is negotiating on our behalf.
God help us all.
