Thread by @Usherwood

Totally the wrong time of day for this, but some thoughts on the Political Declaration:

1/

regular readers will have noted that I've not made comment on it so far today, and that's not simply because I've been doing other stuff

2/

At heart, the PD remains an aspirational document rather than an operational one: lots of ambition to do stuff together, but also the marking out of the likely limits to that

3/

it does what it was always going to do: provide some off-setting of the costs of the Withdrawal Agt (jam tomorrow) and allow all sides to see what they want to see in the future relations (to avoid fighting about it now)

4/

Neither the short version from last week, nor today's full version change that.

It's not 'waffle', but it's also not definitive (and it never was going to be)

5/

Really importantly, the PD seems to be avoiding the closing of any more doors than is strictly necessary. As so often in EU documents, it's the language of "if the UK shifts, then we can shift too"

6/

The issue seems to be that the imprinting going on right now is even more marked than usual: to take one eg, it's willful to complain about the lack of 'frictionless trade' when May always stuck "as possible" on that phrase

7/

In the context of the immediate requirement - to get ratification - this is a real problem: No.10 haven't done the best job in managing expectations here, or about explaining the limits to the WA/PD package

8/

I still don't have a good answer to how May gets this through Parliament, but if there were more selling of this as "it gets us out, and you can have another chance to shape the future", then maybe it could bring some rebels back on-board

9/

(However, even as I write that, it looks weak)

10/

Once again, then, we not really debating the intrinsic merits of the PD (or WA), but the politics around it.

Which is why this never really moves on.

11/

As I wrote this morning (blogs.surrey.ac.uk/politics/2018/…), without a consensus on the purpose of this exercise, more tactical battles and crisis-mgt will predominate

12/

In sum: the PD matters much more right now for how it's used than for what it says

/end