BARELY two hours after Theresa May urged the EU27 to “evolve” its thinking on Brexit, Michel Barnier took to the podium in Brussels to focus on picking holes in her grand plan.
The press conference began relatively well as the EU’s chief negotiator highlighted how 80 per cent of the deal with Britain had been done and that the Prime Minister’s Chequers Plan had opened up the way to “constructive” talks.
On that very fraught issue of the Irish border there were more positive-sounding words with Mr Barnier making clear what he was after might not turn out to be the EU’s offer but just a “workable” plan.
He insisted the EU27 had no intention of creating a border down the Irish Sea – the reddest of Mrs May’s red lines – and stressed: “We can work on this, amend it, improve our backstop.”
But after the positivity came the negativity and the chief negotiator’s catalogue of concerns from how the proposed reciprocity of tariff-collecting could lead to fraud and increased bureaucracy to how the alignment of rules on goods did not cover everything and so could endanger EU consumers.
There was also the little matter of how while the UK wanted divergence on goods, it did not want the same on services, which covered 80 per cent of its economy. Mr Barnier pulled out his mobile phone to illustrate how much of what this particular good contained was services.
If the Irish backstop is the fundamental element that could scupper the whole deal, then his promised flexibility on the issue might be a ray of sunshine that appears from behind a large dark cloud.
His key sentence was: “There will be a deal if there is an agreement on the backstop."
Indeed, the f-word was used by Jeremy Hunt, the new Foreign Secretary, who detracted from the take-it-or-leave-it ultimatum offered by his Cabinet colleague, Andrea Leadsom; she had insisted the Chequers Plan was Britain’s “final offer”, rejection would mean no deal.
Mr Hunt told reporters in Edinburgh Mrs May’s compromise was the “basis upon which a deal can be done” but added it was going to “need imagination and flexibility” to make progress.
This weekend as Dominic Raab, the new Brexit Secretary, takes to the airwaves to emphasise his desire to “intensify” the talks with Brussels, time is beginning to zip by - and with it the chances of getting a deal.
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