Memo to Arlene. Mrs May is talking to Labour. You are, for the time being, an irrelevance.
1 Like
Presumably the DUP can still collapse the government?
Labour say the talks have broken down.
There’s a surprise
Any bets on whatll happen now?
Presumably treasa will go for MV4
brexit means brexit
Macron will get them fucked out
He’d be forcefully supported by the Dutch enforcer Rutte who’s disdain for GB is barely concealed. We’ll be talking about Brexit in 20 years time the way we occasionally now refer to Ballinspittle’s moving statue 40 years ago.
Mythological fables like Cuchullain and the children of Lir stuff.
2 Likes
Big Sam courts controversy,maybe blunt at times but I like him
Susanna Reid really is a lovely lady
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This sums up the complete lack of self awareness and utterly deluded mindset that permeates a lot of what is wrong in England
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The clue is in the description of the author as a journalist with the Daily Mail
Pure hatred and bile
We’re rent free inside the cunts heads now
They are going into the mire, but this time we will not follow them.
The French, the “top gang in the EU playground” 
Fucksake.
Pat Leahy: The EU has been awesome in its Brexit negotiating strategy
IN DEPTH
The long and winding road to Brexit
Parliament has voted to wrest control of the Brexit process. Oliver Wright asks how it came to this
The Times, March 29 2019, 5:00pm
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If Newcastle was the omen, Sunderland was the evidence, and Birmingham and Manchester the proof.
As night turned to dawn in the early hours of Friday June 24, 2016 Britain awoke to a new political reality that few had predicted and, more importantly, no one in government had prepared for: after 40 years Britain had voted to leave the European Union and was in uncharted political and economic territory.
Two years and nine months on that political territory has been charted — but still no one agrees on the map, let alone the route to take.
Supporters of the Stronger In campaign anxiously watch the EU referendum results come inROB STOTHARD/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
So how did we get here? What were the pivotal moments that led to it? And could things have been done differently?
Confusion
From the bleary-eyed jubilation of leavers to the incomprehension of ministers and officials in Whitehall the day after, the referendum result was marked most notably by confusion.
David Cameron resigned despite having insisted he wouldn’t. Jeremy Corbyn called for the immediate triggering of Article 50 without seeming to know what it meant.
And because Mr Cameron had banned civil servants from doing any kind of preparation for a Leave vote Whitehall had no idea where to begin unravelling Britain’s complex political, legal and economic relationship with our nearest neighbours.
A team was hastily scrambled in the Cabinet Office under the leadership of a relatively unknown senior Home Office official called Olly Robbins.
Play Video
A day after the EU referendum result, Prime Minster David Cameron announces his resignation
Mr Cameron boldly claimed the new group would ensure the “next prime minister would have all the information they need to determine exactly the right approach to take to negotiate Britain leaving the EU”.
Like many of the predictions he made during the referendum campaign about the consequences of Brexit, this would prove to be wrong.
Meanwhile, Boris Johnson and Michael Gove launched a Brexiteer Tory leadership bid to take over from the prime minister before falling out, both standing and then both dropping out of the race.
After a few tumultuous days just one candidate remained: Theresa May who, technically a remainer, had gone to strenuous efforts not to imprint her true views on the referendum campaign.
Even before she entered Downing Street she coined the first of many Brexit clichés designed to avoid hard choices: “Brexit,” she said, “means Brexit”, before pledging not to hold a general election.
Play Video
Theresa May speaking in 2016 to announce her candidacy for prime minister, and during her speech coins the phrase ‘Brexit means Brexit’
Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, was more prescient with her choice of cliché: Britain would not be allowed to “cherry-pick” economic access to the EU without following its rules she said four days after the result.
“We will make sure that negotiations will not be carried out as a cherry-picking exercise. There must be, and there will be, a palpable difference between those countries who want to be members of the European family and those who don’t.”
The confusion didn’t improve with Mrs May’s new government. To build a cabinet comprising leavers and remainers she brought in a trio of Brexiteer backbenchers to the top table, created two new departments for them to run and gave them a stately home to share.
The new ministers, David Davis (Department for Exiting the European Union), Liam Fox (Department for International Trade) and Mr Johnson (Foreign Office), were anxious to reassure the public with a continuation of the upbeat rhetoric of the referendum campaign.
Boris Johnson in front of his Battle Bus and the now notorious £350 million claimCHRISTOPHER FURLONG/GETTY IMAGES
The trade deal with the EU would be one of the “easiest in history”, Dr Fox said. Mr Davis said Brussels would be keen to start immediately negotiating a new relationship with the UK, while Mr Johnson reassured the public that leaving the EU did not mean leaving the single market.
I hear people saying, ‘Oh we wont have any [free trade agreements] before we leave’. Well, believe me we’ll have up to 40 ready for one second after midnight in March 2019.
But the EU had other ideas. They rejected a plea by Downing Street to begin even informal talks before the government had officially triggered Article 50 setting a two-year deadline for unravelling 40 years of integration.
They also correctly anticipated that their greatest weakness would lie in their unity as 27 states with different interests and relationships with the UK.
In what, with hindsight, was a masterstroke Donald Tusk, the European Council president, quickly announced that Brexit negotiations would not be carried out at a governmental level.
IN YOUR INBOX
Policy editor Oliver Wright and politics reporter Henry Zeffman help you understand the effects of the UK’s decision to leave the European Union
The terms of Britain’s departure would be negotiated with the European Commission only. Member states would ratify a deal but never negotiate it.
And they stuck to it, both in refusing to allow Mrs May to engage in unilateral negotiations and refusing to talk at all before Britain set the two-year clock ticking. Brexiteers say now that Mrs May made a strategic blunder by triggering Article 50 too early. But the political reality in autumn 2016 was that she had no choice. With Europe refusing even to discuss privately what kind of deal might be possible, Mrs May was facing intense pressure from Brexiteers who were increasingly anxious for tangible progress.
British people will still be able to go and work in the EU . . . There will continue to be free trade, and access to the single market.
Mr Johnson, despite being a cabinet minister, publicly told Mrs May to “get on with it”, while the former ministers Iain Duncan Smith, John Redwood and Owen Paterson privately warned the prime minister that the party would not support any delay in starting the process.
At the Conservative Party conference in October Mrs May was forced to announce that Brexit would be triggered no later than March 2017.
Red lines
The announcement of the Article 50 deadline grabbed the headlines but looking back now, Mrs May’s Sunday afternoon conference speech in Birmingham was far more significant for its less reported passages.
In two short, coded sections Mrs May set down the parameters of her Brexit blueprint that have dominated the debate ever since.
When we sign up [to Article 50] we will know the shape of the deal. Boris [Johnson] is going to the EU foreign affairs council this weekend. Are they going to say, ‘Oh, I can’t mention this to you’? Of course not.
In the first she effectively ruled out Britain remaining in the EU’s single market by demanding full control over immigration; and in the second she ruled out remaining in a customs union.
“We are going, once more, to have the freedom to make our own decisions on a whole host of different matters, from how we label our food to the way in which we choose to control immigration . . . We are not leaving only to return to the jurisdiction of the European Court of Justice.
“Let’s have the confidence in ourselves to go out into the world, securing trade deals, generating wealth and creating jobs.”
INTERACTIVE
From the cost of Marmite to the future of the fishing industry: explore what leaving the EU will really mean for Britain
Whitehall was appalled. In Brussels, Britain’s ambassador Ivan Rogers began to hear from his EU counterparts: “Clearly you’re leaving the single market and the customs union. Why then can’t [you] just get on with it?”
He told them that they should not take party political speeches at face value, and that they did not represent government policy.
But he was wrong. The decision to use conference to set out the red lines on Brexit was deliberate. Nick Timothy, Mrs May’s powerful chief of staff, knew that using a party political speech in this way meant that the announcement did not need to go through the normal Whitehall processes or collective cabinet responsibility to be approved. And, having made the pledge, it would be hard for opponents to reverse.
Philip Hammond, the chancellor, hadn’t seen it. Mr Davis hadn’t seen it.
Mr Robbins, who had then become Mrs May’s chief Europe advisor, hadn’t seen it.
Today on behalf of the 27 leaders, I can say that we are determined to keep our unity as 27. For the start of the negotiations – we need the triggering of Article 50. This is the position shared by all 27 member states. To put it simply, the ball is now in your court.
The prime minister’s red lines, which have defined and bedevilled the Brexit negotiations to this day, were created in almost total secrecy, without scrutiny and without challenge.
They were then presented as a fait accompli and formalised as the government’s Brexit strategy at Mrs May’s Lancaster House speech the following January.
Brexiteers were delighted but the inflexibility of the government’s position — and the trade-off it involved — was to come back and haunt her.
The clock starts ticking
Early on March 29, 2017 two civil servants, carrying a black suitcase, caught a Eurostar train bound for Brussels.
In it was the letter written by Mrs May the night before informing the EU of the government’s decision to trigger Article 50, setting the two-year clock running to Britain’s EU departure.
Theresa May signs the letter invoking Article 50 and triggering the process to leave the EUCHRISTOPHER FURLONG /GETTY IMAGES
Once in Brussels (the round-trip cost the taxpayer more than £1,000 for two business premier seats) the briefcase and the letter were handed over to Britain’s new EU ambassador Sir Tim Barrow, who walked the short distance from Britain’s EU mission to formally present it to Mr Tusk. Both men looked suitably uncomfortable at the bizarre photo opportunity.
The six-page letter contained little that seemed new at the time. But now it shows how little understanding there was in London at the pitfalls of the process ahead.
Mrs May told Mr Tusk that the UK wanted to agree the terms of Britain’s future relationship “alongside those of our withdrawal from the EU”, negotiating a “bold and ambitious” free-trade agreement with the bloc by March 2019.
The Northern Irish border merited little more than a passing mention: “We want to avoid a return to a hard border between our two countries,” she wrote.
She concluded: “Because the future partnership between the UK and the EU is of such importance to both sides, I am sure it can be agreed in the time period set out by the (Article 50) Treaty.”
Such statements — like so many before and after — were to prove overly optimistic.
Strong and stable no more
If a single factor undermined Mrs May’s ability to deliver the aspirations set out in her letter it was her decision, made on an Easter walking holiday in Snowdonia two weeks later, to go back on her word and call a general election.
At the time the logic was impeccable: the Tories had a 19-point poll lead and Mrs May’s own personal poll ratings were at a near high of 21 per cent over the Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn.
She also only had a majority of 12 in the House of Commons, making her vulnerable to rebellions from her own backbenchers. Downing Street rightly recognised that any deal would require compromise, and compromise would be hard to force through with the ideological differences in the Commons. The polling suggested the Tories would win the election with a majority of at least 100.
But the gamble, of course, failed and with it Mrs May’s power and authority to dictate the terms of Brexit drained away with it.
Perhaps it was because of the prime minister’s seeming invincibility that voters registered a protest by supporting Labour even if they did not necessarily want Mr Corbyn in Downing Street. There was also evidence of pro-European Tory voters deserting the party over Mrs May’s strident approach to her vision of Brexit.
Whatever the reasons, the Tories lost what majority they had, leaving Mrs May at the mercies of her deeply divided MPs and the Democratic Unionist Party, which had its own Brexit agenda.
It had been a disastrous miscalculation.
The first negotiating mistakes
Ten days after the election in June 2017, Brexit negotiations formally began in Brussels between David Davis and the EU’s recently appointed chief negotiator Michel Barnier — a French former EU commissioner quickly caricatured by the Brexit-supporting press as an anti-British Eurocrat intent on punishing the UK.
To mark the start of the talks Mr Davis gave Mr Barnier a book on hiking and Mr Barnier reciprocated with a hiking stick. It was the high point of their relationship.
Because behind the smiles and faux bonhomie, things were already going wrong.
David Davis, the Brexit minister, and Michel Barnier, Europe’s chief negotiator, at the end of the first day of negotiationsEMMANUEL DUNAND/AFP/GETTY IMAGES
Mr Davis had claimed in the run-up to the meeting that the UK would insist on parallel negotiations on the withdrawal agreement and the future relationship.
“This will be the row of the summer,” he predicted.
Mr Barnier had other ideas and made clear on day one that the EU would not discuss the future relationship until Britain had agreed to pay the divorce bill, settle citizens’ rights and agree measures to prevent a hard border in Northern Ireland.
There would be no parallel talks; they would be sequential with the EU’s priorities being dealt with first.
Mr Davis didn’t care for Mr Barnier’s manner or how he used press conferences to ambush him.
He wanted a showdown but, against his wishes and undermining his credibility, Downing Street capitulated. The UK accepted the EU schedule for the talks, meaning discussions on a future trade deal would only start when the EU had got what it wanted on the money. The gloss put on the climbdown by Mr Davis was that this did not matter because, in the latest Brexit cliché, “nothing is agreed until everything is agreed”.
But this hid the fact that if the UK wanted the time to agree a detailed future relationship it couldn’t play brinkmanship.
Mr Davis largely blamed Mr Robbins for the climbdown. He believed that his permanent secretary (who was also Mrs May’s chief Europe adviser) was cutting him out of the critical negotiating decisions while he himself — extraordinarily — had little private access to the prime minister. He didn’t even have her mobile number.
Relations between the two men became poisonous and petty. Mr Robbins, who had been trailing around Europe on Easyjet talking to EU national capitals, was incensed when Mr Davis demanded the use of a private RAF plane to fly to Brussels. He tried unsuccessfully to veto it.
Although not widely recognised at the time, the fracture came to a head in September when Mr Robbins left the Brexit department to lead a new “Europe unit” inside the Cabinet Office.
From that point on Downing Street took over the Brexit talks entirely, with Mr Robbins, rather than Mr Davis, as the prime minister’s real negotiator.
Money, money, money
With Mr Davis out of the way talks began in earnest in Brussels. A team of officials from across Whitehall decamped to the Belgium capital to engage in line-by-line negotiations over the exact terms of Britain’s departure.
The Brexit department spent more than £150,000 on flights and hotels to put them all up.
Questions that seemed vital at the time but have now largely been forgotten were pored over: would EU citizens living in Britain with criminal records be allowed to stay after Brexit? What role would the European Court of Justice play in ruling on their rights? Most importantly how much, if anything, would Britain pay to settle its debts — if indeed, there were any debts to pay?
All sorts of dubious analogies were used, from Brexiteers claiming the EU was like a golf club you could walk away from to Guy Verhofstadt, the EU parliament’s Brexit co-ordinator, likening the divorce bill to an outstanding payment for a round of drinks. EU taxpayers, he said, would not “pay Britain’s bar bill”.
Brexiteer ministers were equally exercised. Mr Johnson described the EU’s demands as “extortionate” and said the EU could “go whistle” for their money. Mr Davis dismissed any idea that the bill could even reach the tens of billions of pounds.
But in the end the £39 billion divorce bill was the Brexit dog that never bit. When the final figure was published in December as part of a joint declaration Brexiteers rolled over and accepted it without a murmur.
The most the arch-Brexiteer Bernard Jenkin could muster was: “It better be worth it.”
For this, the government largely had the Financial Times to thank. The paper had calculated in the early autumn that the UK’s liabilities to the bloc could be as much as €100 billion. So when the total figure came in at less than half that (with a two-year transition period to boot) it was seen as a modest win for the prime minister.
Some very meaningful votes
Negotiations in Brussels were only half of the government’s headache.
Legislation to enable Britain’s departure to happen at all had to be passed by parliament but since the general election the House of Commons was not one that could be easily controlled.
The government’s strategy was, as the Brexit secretary privately described it at the time, to bring in a “dreadnought” bill that could have chunks blown off it by MPs and still survive.
The bill’s first function was to set in law Britain’s departure by repealing the European Communities Act which had brought Britain into the EU. The second was to ensure legal stability by incorporating all existing EU law into the UK statute book.
What Mr Davis may not have appreciated fully was that MPs opposed to the government’s hardline approach would not attempt to blow chunks off the dreadnought but instead construct a new troublesome edifice to be fitted onto it.
Clause nine of the original bill gave ministers the unilateral power to negotiate and conclude the withdrawal agreement without needing the legal approval of parliament.
But by the time the bill left parliament a small band of Conservative MPs, provocatively dubbed “mutineers” by the Brexit press, had turned this on its head.
In a series of late-night, knife-edge votes and last-minute concessions by ministers in the Commons, they forced the government into a double lock: first to put any deal to a “meaningful vote” of MPs, who would decide whether to approve it or not, and second to come back to the Commons with an alternative plan should the deal be rejected. Any other Brexit deal would be illegal.
It was not what the government wanted at all.
Although not widely appreciated at the time, the reality was that through a series of seemingly arcane procedural changes to the bill the “mutineers” had driven a coach and horses through the government’s strategy.
It had laid the seeds for parliament, rather than the government, to dictate the terms of Brexit should they not approve of Mrs May’s deal.
And it meant that parliament, not the prime minister, now held the whip hand.
The “mutineers”, having been bloodied by the battles over the withdrawal bill, became, like the Brexiteers, a force to be reckoned with.
A deal and a problem
On the morning of Monday December 4, 2017 Mrs May flew out to Brussels.
Arlene Foster, the Democratic Unionist Party leader, was furious after a putative deal was announcedDOMINIC LIPINSKI/PA
As she was in the air the president of the European Council took to Twitter to declare “tell me why I like Mondays!”, a jokey reference to the Boomtown Rats song suggesting that the carefully choreographed plan to announce a breakthrough in the Brexit talks was on track.
Within hours, the putative deal was in tatters on an issue that was to become the defining dilemma of the Brexit negotiations: how to manage the Irish border.
A draft text of the deal, due to be signed by Mrs May and the EU, was leaked to the Irish media who claimed Mrs May had accepted the principle that there would be “no regulatory divergence” between Northern Ireland and the EU’s single market and customs union rules.
In fact, the draft agreement used much looser language on “alignment” but the difference was lost on Arlene Foster, the Democratic Unionist Party leader, who had been briefed on the deal but had not seen the text.
While Mrs May was lunching with Jean-Claude Juncker, the EU Commission president, on roasted scallops and turbot, a furious Mrs Foster was demanding to speak to the prime minister.
The lunch had to be interrupted while Mrs May tried, and failed, to mollify Mrs Foster. In the end she had no choice but to return to the lunch table and announce that the deal was off.
Members of the Border Communities against Brexit group dress as customs officers at a mock customs checkpointCHARLES MCQUILLAN/GETTY IMAGES
The setback was temporary but the fudge that resolved it proved to be Brexit’s Catch 22.
In two short paragraphs in the December joint report Britain agreed to avoid a hard border in Northern Ireland, avoid regulatory and tariff divergence between Britain and Northern Ireland, while at the same time pledging that Britain would still be able to strike its own trade deals.
No one had any idea how to achieve these contradictory aims while abiding by Mrs May’s red lines of leaving the single market and customs union. They still don’t.
The path to Chequers
In the early evening of Friday July 6, 2018 Downing Street released a three-page statement to the media. Signed at bottom “HM Government”, it outlined a decision taken by the cabinet at the prime minister’s Chequers retreat that day setting out the government’s plan for a future relationship with the European Union.
Every minister present signed up, with those thinking of resigning told they would have to walk down the long Chequers drive and call a cab if they couldn’t live with the deal on the table.
The cabinet agreement signed at Chequers quickly unravelledMARK KERRISON/ALAMY
In the event Mr Davis chose to hold his tongue and take his chauffeur-driven ministerial limo back to London before resigning less than 48 hours later.
Mr Johnson, keen not to be outflanked by his Brexiteer rival, quickly followed suit.
Before the government had had the chance to put flesh on the bones of the Chequers declaration, the “HM Government” sign-off rang remarkably hollow.
At its heart the Chequers plan was an attempt to extricate the government from the Irish border conundrum that it had agreed to in the December joint declaration.
It proposed establishing a “free trade area for goods” between Britain and the EU that would provide frictionless borders not just between the North and South of Ireland but across the Channel as well.
To square the circle of how you could achieve this while allowing the UK to strike its own free-trade deals, Whitehall came up with an ingenious and fiendishly complicated plan that they called the “facilitated customs arrangement”.
The details matter little now as the proposal did not survive first contact with European negotiators.
“The EU cannot and the EU will not delegate the application of its customs policy to a non-member who would not be subject to the EU’s governance structures,” Mr Barnier said.
Chequers was dead, the Irish border question no closer to being solved, and Mrs May’s two-year struggle to keep her party united behind the government’s approach to Brexit had failed.
She now had two powerful new opponents in Mr Davis and Mr Johnson on the back benches, while Brexiteers increasingly appeared to be a party within a party, intent on waging civil war.
It was the beginning of the end.
Countdown to a deal: clutching defeat from the jaws of victory
A few months after the referendum result Sir Jeremy Heywood, the cabinet secretary, privately identified the Irish border issue both as the biggest threat — and the biggest opportunity — in Britain’s Brexit negotiating strategy.
His logic was impeccable. He believed the EU would try to punish the UK for leaving by restricting economic access to EU markets. But equally, he suspected that Brussels could not and would not countenance a hard border in Ireland. His logic was that protecting the free border in Ireland could be leveraged to give the whole of the UK better access to EU markets than it would have otherwise have had.
The EU anticipated this and in the aftermath of Chequers proposed what it described as a Northern Ireland-specific backstop. This called for the province to follow the rules of the EU customs union and single market while Britain went its own way with full third-country border checks imposed across the Channel.
It is one of the biggest ironies of the negotiation process that Mrs May’s most significant victory over Brussels was to cause her the greatest anguish back home.
The government suffered its first defeat after MPs supported a Tory rebel amendment for a “meaningful vote” in December 2017PA
In a series of marathon negotiating sessions in October 2018 the EU conceded for the first time that the whole of the UK could be included in the so-called Northern Irish backstop.
This would give the UK access to the EU markets without following single market rules, without paying into EU budgets, without following judgments by the European Court of Justice and without having to be part of either the common agricultural or common fisheries policy.
Dominic Raab resigned as Brexit secretary and for a short period the prime minister’s future hung in the balanceTOLGA AKMEN/GETTY IMAGES
What’s more the backstop was not time limited. The EU had quietly jettisoned most of its previous red lines to accommodate the unique historical problems of Northern Ireland.
It was objectively a stunning and significant win for the government that would arguably give Britain a stronger hand in the trade talks to come.
But the problem was the domestic politics: it fell foul of the totemic Brexiteer pledge that Britain’s departure from the EU would herald a new era as a global trading behemoth. Under the backstop, as agreed, the UK’s ability to strike free-trade deals would be very much curtailed, possibly for ever.
Even before the deal was published in November Brexiteers made common cause with the DUP in strident opposition to Mrs May’s plan.
Dominic Raab, the Brexit secretary, resigned and for 24 hours Mrs May’s future hung in the balance as Mr Gove and other Brexiteer cabinet ministers weighed up their positions.
Ultimately Mr Gove decided to stay for fear of playing Judas twice and the cabinet revolt fizzled out.
A miscalculation by the European Research Group (ERG) resulted in them triggering a leadership election without the numbers to land a killer blow.
Philip Hammond hands the prime minister a cough sweet as she delivers her speech at the party conference in October 2017CHRIS RATCLIFFE/GETTY IMAGES
That meant that Mrs May was safe in her job, but at the head of party irreconcilably split trying to force a deal through parliament for which even she could not muster much enthusiasm.
Brexit day was just three months away.
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Brussels takes control
European summits are calculated affairs. In theory they are the forum where national leaders make the ultimate decisions on behalf of the bloc.
In reality the heavy lifting, and most of the decision making, is done in advance by EU ambassadors, national “sherpas” and Brussels officials. Leaders then rubber-stamp them.
So when Theresa May wrote to Donald Tusk on March 20 requesting a three-month extension until June 30 to get her withdrawal deal over the line it was done in the expectation that it would be granted.
But these are not normal times. The request did not even make it to the summit table and when leaders assembled a day later they went one step further and ripped up the compromise plan that had been carefully crafted by their own officials.
Having banished Mrs May to eat dinner alone, for six hours they argued over how tough to be.
President Macron of France and Charles Michel, the Belgium prime minister, took the hardest line, warning that nothing but a “miracle” could prevent Mrs May’s deal being defeated again.
It was claimed that a million protesters took to the streets to call on the government to give Britons a vote on the final Brexit dealHENRY NICHOLLS/REUTERS
Viktor Orban, the autocratic and proudly illiberal Hungarian prime minister, said that a no-deal was a real possibility because he had learnt from the experience of Margaret Thatcher that Tory leaders only cared about one thing: the Conservative Party.
In the end Angela Merkel brokered a compromise. Britain could have an extension until May 22 but only if parliament ratified the withdrawal agreement before the end of March 29.
If the deal failed to get through at the third time of asking then EU leaders set a three-week deadline for the UK to come up with an alternative proposal with the next hard Brexit deadline set as April 12.
But while the meeting was long and fractious it did establish some clear principles for how the bloc intended to proceed.
In private EU leaders decided that they would not allow themselves to end up the “villains” of the piece by precipitating a no-deal Brexit.
If Britain decided to walk off the cliff then fine, but EU leaders would not push them.
At the same time they concluded that they needed to force some kind of decision out of Westminster. If Mrs May’s plan for a future relationship was not going to pass, the summit conclusions were designed to force MPs to try to find something that would or face a long extension and the prospect of taking part in European elections.
As one British journalist covering the summit quipped afterwards, it was nice to be in the presence of “adult politicians”.
MPs try to take control
If Brussels dictated the terms of the Brexit debate in the last week of March, it was parliament, rather than Mrs May, that seized control of it.
And it was a revolutionary in the unlikely form of the ex-Etonian Sir Oliver Letwin who took the lead.
The former cabinet fixer for David Cameron defied appeals for loyalty and spearheaded an initiative with Labour support to give MPs control of the Commons agenda to find an alternative to Mrs May’s deal that could command majority support.
On one level the move was extraordinary for the fact that it had not happened earlier.
Ever since the election the prime minister knew that there was no majority in the Commons for the type of Brexit that she wanted to deliver.
But at no stage did she bend her red lines, reach across party lines to compromise or indeed provide the time for MPs to debate and vote on a consensus way forward.
In the end it had to be forced upon her at the eleventh hour.
So far that process has proved to be inconclusive - but not unconstructive. A proposal for the UK to remain in a customs union with the EU fell by only seven votes on Wednesday night - with a large number of abstentions.
It was also possible to see the way to a majority for the softest possible Brexit inside the customs union and single market.
The teeth in the Letwin move is that if any of the options does get a majority then the mechanism to control the Commons agenda means that MPs could pass legislation compelling Mrs May to bend to their will.
We are not there yet - but could be soon.
End game
Giving evidence to the Commons Brexit select committee in October 2017 David Davis told MPs that parliament might not get the chance to ratify a deal with Brussels before March 29, 2019 because “the way the EU makes its decisions tends to be at the 59th minute of the 11th hour of the last day”.
He was wrong. It has been the British parliament rather than the European Union that has run down the clock.
Downing Street’s strategy to get the prime minister’s deal over the line was predicated on three assumptions, all of which turned out to be untrue.
The first was that Conservative Brexiteers would ultimately vote for the deal — even if they hated it — for fear of a softer Brexit or no Brexit at all.
Some have done. But more than a dozen Tory Brexiteers are still gambling that a failure to endorse the deal would lead to a long extension of Article 50, during which they can replace the prime minister.
Given the make-up of the Tory grassroots electorate her successor, they calculated and calculate, will be a true Brexiteer, who would either face down Brussels or walk away without a deal.
Marchers on the first leg of the March to Leave demonstration in SunderlandIAN FORSYTH/GETTY IMAGES
The second assumption was that Labour MPs in Leave seats would ultimately be prepared to back the deal for fear of opening the door to either a second referendum or a no-deal.
But with a lengthy extension on the table and a clear parliamentary majority against no-deal that fear is off the table, at least for now. The cliff edge is no longer a cliff edge. They anticipate there is a majority for a softer Brexit in the Commons even if it crosses party lines.
Finally, Downing Street calculated that by now politicians would simply want to move on and that compromise rather than conflict would ultimately hold sway. That was perhaps the biggest miscalculation of all.
If the EU referendum was divisive, the process of Brexit has not healed those divisions but sharpened them.
The divide is no longer simply between Brexiteers and remainers; it is between hardline Brexiteers and those who are accused of selling out for a bad deal.
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Whar are you paying for the sub?
I got 5e a month recently when I called to cancel
Ah here! I think it’s €26 a month - send on that number.