The problem with leaving things to the last minute is that there is no time to resolve anything unforeseen that arises. Theresa May is discovering this now. We have effectively wasted months of negotiating only to concede the EU's initial position on the money and on citizen's rights and now, so it seems, on the Irish border. We are really up against the clock. The DUP seem in no hurry to help Mrs May resolve the border issue (HERE) as the ticking grows ever louder.
Instead of putting effort into resolving internal party differences here in the UK we launched ourselves into a negotiation with no consensus about where we were headed. The "row of the summer" to use Davis' own phrase, should have been the one developing right now between hard and soft Brexiteers and remainers about what the final destination should be. As Barnier has pointed out, do we want a close relationship with the EU or not? We have shoved this issue down the road ever since the referendum without ever once facing down the have cake and eat it brigade.
The Guardian (HERE) quoting senior cabinet sources, claims that discussions at May’s recent inner-cabinet on Brexit talks covered the question of how to calculate the divorce bill and issues relating to the European Court of Justice but not regulation and the Irish border. It even suggests that David Davis only saw that the word “alignment”, which caused much of the controversy, was added to the text on Sunday evening. A Whitehall source insisted that simply reflected “how late the text was being worked on”. Who is doing the negotiating?
According to The Independent (HERE) the PM has not contacted Arlene Foster, leader of the neanderthal DUP and Downing Street doesn't know when they will speak. How the deadlock is to be broken is a mystery now. The DUP are very unhappy at the text of the draft agreement suggesting regulatory alignment for Northern Ireland and want big changes. I'll cover this in a later posting because I'm very interested in the difference, if there is one, between no divergence and alignment.
The Irish PM, Leo Varadkar, is saying they are unequivocal about the text, and in response the DUP say they too are unequivocal. So it's stalemate. Europe is perhaps about to find out how intransigent the Irish can be.
The article also suggests, perhaps unsurprisingly, that Davis is sick of it amidst reports that he feels sidelined. If it looks like chaos from the outside think yourself lucky you can't see inside!
