Thread by @DavidHenigUK

Worth a little thread on the language of Government. Essentially "sherpa" = PM's advisor and lead official preparing for summits like G7, G20, European Council. They define what the UK wants to see in a summit outcome, and negotiate an actual text, with cross-Government support

https://twitter.com/pmdfoster/status/1153690823571234816

"Sherpas" are assisted in turn by "yaks" (not making this up I promise) who in reality do lots of the legwork on communicating with Government departments, international counterparts, and literally carry the bags when the summit actually happens.

Other EU Member States have "Sherpas" and "Yaks", as do the likes of the US, Japan, Australia etc. It is a key part of summit diplomacy

Quite the international network. Jon Cunliffe and Ivan Rogers were the two UK Sherpas I experienced, in rather long cross-Whitehall meetings

This is all fine you may say, but what does a UK Sherpa have to do with a bilateral UK-EU negotiation, when the EU has a lead negotiator? And that is a good question, never answered. It is almost like we think we're negotiating as an EU Member, and the EU see us as a 3rd country

We will have lots of Government appointments to consider later in the day. But for a negotiation, here's the easy analysis. Map the two sides. Johnson's counterpart = Charles Michel (who is thought to dislike him), Ursula von der Leyen. Barnier equivalent is ?

Of course there are always lots of advisors. What we await to see with team Johnson, and probably will wait for a while, is who are the decision makers. We see competing factions, but in a negotiation you can only have a single message.

Happy speculating, I'm off to Brighton...