There will be no last-minute deal. The talks between the UK and the EU have effectively broken down. It isn’t that there’s no light at the end of the tunnel, it’s that there’s no tunnel at all. The blame game is now far more advanced than the negotiations. The diplomatic crockery has been smashed even before Boris Johnson and the leaders of the EU27 have arrived in Brussels for this month’s European Council. The question now is whether the talks can ever be resuscitated at a later date — or if we are in a world where the only options are no Brexit or no deal.
The assumption had long been that as the 31 October deadline neared, one side or the other would blink. That the pressure would produce a compromise. Instead, all sides are raising the stakes and hardening their stances. No. 10 is blaming Irish and EU intransigence for the failure of the talks; Donald Tusk is using Twitter to make jabs at the British Prime Minister. A deal seems to be a lost cause.
One of the biggest problems is that 31 October, the departure date that became the trademark of the Johnson leadership campaign, is not a deadline any more. Parliament has seen to that. No. 10’s plan to make the EU and Dublin choose between ‘a new deal and no deal’ has been scuppered by the Benn Act. There’s no pressure on the other side to compromise to avoid no deal and the consequent inevitable hardening of the Irish border.
What is frustrating No. 10 is a sense that the other side of the table is taking for granted the concessions it is offering: mainly a UK/Northern Ireland regulatory border and effectively leaving Northern Ireland in the EU single market for goods and agriculture. (The EU and the Irish would counter that Johnson’s government has already resiled from commitments made by the May government on Northern Ireland.)
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