James Forsyth James Forsyth

The deal-or-no-deal debate is different this time

[Getty Images]

When a deadline is missed for Brexit negotiations, it is tempting to think there will be another chance to keep talks going. Last week, the UK and the EU agreed that things needed to be wrapped up by Sunday night or Monday afternoon at the latest. The thinking was that if a deal was not done by then, the return of the Internal Market Bill to the Commons would scupper negotiations. But Monday afternoon passed with no agreement. The two sides now admit that the only real deadline is the end of the transition period on 31 December.

The talks are currently in a state of suspended animation. After nine months, the sticking points are the same three issues: the so-called level playing field, fish and governance. Boris Johnson and Ursula von der Leyen each think the other wants a deal. The hope is that their face-to-face meeting can encourage some creativity and give the negotiators something to work with. I understand that their phone calls have been cordial but haven’t produced any new ideas about how the log jam might be broken.

In some ways this all seems like a repeat of October last year. Then, the negotiations were making no progress, and a no-deal Brexit seemed inevitable. Johnson went to meet the then Irish Taoiseach Leo Varadkar. There was general pessimism in Downing Street about how likely the meeting was to yield anything. Yet against expectations the two leaders managed, during a walk in the woods, to pave the way for an agreement.

There are two significant differences this time, though. The first is that back then only Ireland was directly affected by the issues under discussion. This meant that if the Irish were happy, the rest of the EU would be too. Now, most of the EU’s 27 member states have interests at stake.

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