.@theresa_may seemed to say to @SophyRidgeSky there is no scope to renegotiate backstop and Withdrawal Agreement - thus apparently slapping down @andrealeadsom, @michaelgove, @PennyMordaunt, @LiamFox and Grayling. Her offer to them appeared to be to wait and see...
...what the Political Declaration says next Sunday about the nature of the UK’s future relationship with the EU - as if this would reassure them. But the Withdrawal Agreement, when signed, will be a legally binding document. The Political Declaration will...
...be a non-binding statement of intent. The Brexiters in the cabinet will look at the Political Declaration - even when fleshed out from today’s seven page draft to the expected maximum of 20 pages, compared with the Withdrawal Agreement’s 585 - and fear that it...
...presages many years of negotiation to transform it into a legal treaty running to hundreds of pages. In fact they will see the Political Declaration’s apparent countenancing of what the PM sees as a special and unique deal for the UK, what she sees as an important victory,...
...as making inevitable that talks to turn the framework for a future relationship into a deal will last many many years, far longer than the 21 months of the agreed transition. So the ambition implicit in the Political Declaration actually makes more likely what the Brexiters...
...fear most, namely that the backstop - or an expensive extension of the transition - will be implemented at the end of 2020. May will be accused by her Brexiter colleagues of the Johnsonian crime of having and eating cake - of claiming...
...that the backstop is unlikely to be implemented even when she eschews the kind of future relationship that would be easier and far quicker to finalise because it is largely off-the-shelf and consistent with extant EU models and deals. I cannot see the Cabinet...
...Brexiters, or indeed the Brexiters on Tory benches, being reassured in the slightest. The coming week will see the civil war in the UK’s governing part intensify. Theresa May is not over the worst; she cannot yet be confident of securing her Brexit deal or keeping her job.
