Thread by @pmdfoster

A short thread on @JGForsyth exlposive(ly) transparent memo from the Cummings wing of Downing Street - and what it reveals about dynamics as we limp to Failure Friday /thread.

So the obvious First point is that it comes from the Cummings Wing of Downing Street which as I first reported on the day before the Benn act vote has always viewed the negs as a “sham”/2

https://twitter.com/pmdfoster/status/1168641286292824064?s=21

It’s clearly designed to head off any prospect of a deal, including the risk that the EU offers an NI only backstop with a time limit - a fear which itself reveals how little they understand where we are. /3

Even more hilarious is the suggestion that the offer to align Northern Ireland on industrial goods was going to get @LeoVaradkar to cave to a customs border.

The lack of Apparent understanding About their own proposal is striking./4

The DUP veto that makes the entire proposal liable to collapse before the end of transition, Not to mention the total lack of detail on how the UK will deliver on any of it’s suggestions, means that this proposal is a nonstarter for everyone. /5

So @LeoVaradkar could wake up tomorrow morning and decide that this proposal was the best thing since sliced bread and @MichelBarnier @EU_Commission would still shoot it down

It’s frankly touching these people think otherwise./7

The threat to withdraw security cooperation is also frankly silly.

I understand Cummings and @SteveBarclay I’ve been advocating to play this “card” for some time...but Whitehall/MI5 won’t play without explicit direction from the PM...who righty hasn’t given it /8

The core of this is Intel on Islamist terrorism that we share with the French and vice versa, I understand, and that ain’t stopping any time. What next? PSNI refusing to share threat intel with the Garda? Grow up. /9

And yet in someway the craziest part of all is the promise to win a majority and then use it to smash the EU by inflicting a “no deal” on them....and £15bn worth of Customs forms on the U.K biz? Genius. /10

What a way of spending a majority if you were to win one. It would be the political equivalent of winning the Darwin Award.

There will have to be a deal after a no deal. Just one fine from out knees. No faster way NOT to “get Brexit done” /11

And guess what?

Those clever chaps and chapesses can see all this perfectly well.

It’s why they have never really bought The no Deal threats they are now urged to take so seriously again./12

And they cannot seriously believe that any government would do something so spectacularly self-defeating.

The risk of course is that Cummings and friends climb so far up the tree on this, that a no deal is the only way down. /13

Or would @BorisJohnson actually use his majority to do the deal a deal that really does “get Brexit done”, move us into transition and a EU-U.K. trade deal that might open a solution to the NI border question (see threads passim)

To my mind that’s the new #brexit Q. ENDS