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Much as my heart goes out to the O'Luvvies this piece from tomorrow's Sunday Times is more relevant.
Theresa May’s threats to pursue a no-deal Brexit are not believed in Brussels and she should return only when she has a deal that can pass the House of Commons, EU officials have told The Sunday Times.One senior figure compared May’s no-deal posturing to someone about to commit suicide warning a passer-by that their clothes might get soiled. “None of us wants a cliff edge. None of us wants a no-deal, but the idea that you can threaten member states on the Continent with that is ridiculous,” the official said.
“It’s like saying, ‘Do this or we shoot ourselves in the head. You may get some blood on you.’ . . . We never considered it credible.” Two senior figures in the Brussels bureaucracy said there was no point returning for further negotiations unless May can convince the European Commission and member states that changes to her deal will be approved by MPs. They said May’s demands for changes to the backstop at meetings in December were not taken seriously because “she had no mandate”.
Offering May advice, one official said: “If you want to put the EU in a difficult position you need a plan that is supported by a majority in the House of Commons. The leaders were very clear that she did not have a mandate for the things she was saying.” The other source added: “To negotiate you need to have a mandate. You need to demonstrate that if you do a deal you can deliver that deal.”
Both officials, however, said that if Ireland changes its approach to the backstop they would be prepared to do so as well.
“The problem of the Irish border is a real one. This is a key existential problem for one of our member states. We owe it to the Irish to stand by them,” one official said. “But at the end of the day it’s an Irish backstop that will be defined in Dublin. People around that table would be ashamed to put pressure on [Irish prime minister Leo] Varadkar but if Ireland changes its mind they will listen to him.”
In a further softening of the line, sources close to Guy Verhofstadt, the European parliament’s key negotiator on Brexit, said officials are drawing up proposals for Britain to use a “pay as you go” membership model while the details of a deal are hammered out.
Brexiteer cabinet ministers are angry that assurances in a letter last week from Donald Tusk and Jean-Claude Juncker, presidents of the EU Council and the EU Commission, were not legally binding.
“The Tusk/Juncker letter says if we enter the backstop we will leave it as soon as we can and this letter is binding but they won’t put it as an addendum to the withdrawal bill,” one minister said.
“That’s really pathetic. Are you seriously going to let the entire house of cards fall over something so trivial?”