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Courtesy of the Telegraph.
It should not have come as a surprise to anyone who has followed the Brexit negotiations over the past year that Theresa May signalled to EU leaders at last night’s October European Council dinner that she was open to extending the transition period. The 21-month period initially agreed was - as any trade expert in the land has been saying from the very outset - never, ever going to be sufficient to negotiate something as complex as a new trading relationship between the United Kingdom and the European Union.
And, of course, this will not have come as a surprise to Mrs May herself. Sir Ivan Rogers, her loquacious former ambassador to the EU said even before Article 50 was triggered it would take ten years to do a deal. She got that unpalatable memo, which was then deliberately leaked in order to undermine Sir Ivan to the point that his position became untenable. So he quit. But since then civil servants have continued to speak truth unto power. Olly Robbins, has been telling her the same for at least a year now - and, as this newspaper reported back in January, officials were discreetly discussing sounding out an extension period in Brussels back then.
But instead of explaining to everyone that Brexit was a “process, not an event”, the hysterical Downing Street machine denied this as a categoric lie. In March it was revealed that HMRC told cabinet that the UK would not be leaving the Customs Union until 2023 because - whatever kind of Brexit the cabinet agreed to - the technology would not be ready until then anyway. Downing Street persisted in the fiction of a 21-month transition. Right from the start, from her very first speech as leader to Tory party conference in 2016 when she made herself hostage to totally unrealistic promises on completely leaving the single market, customs union and European Court of Justice, Mrs May has failed to explain that the Brexit process must be taken one step at a time.