Read the piece and tell me if there's anything in there you think is factually incorrect or biased.
It's one the finest analyses I'd read about the Brexit situation as it was, is, and will be.
Brexit will not 'be done' next year, or the year after that, or the year after that - and so on.
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I also struggle to see PM Johnson wishing to extend.
It’s not primarily that it would involve a screeching U-turn from what he is promising the public and Party now.
He after all has just executed one of those on the backstop question by doing a deal for which he would have excoriated his predecessor for giving way on fundamental principles of constitutional integrity.
The EU noticed that, noticed with some admiration that he nevertheless could sell a Withdrawal Agreement when Mrs May couldn’t – and they frankly never believed she could—and that is why, given he had dropped overnight the stuff on “alternative arrangements” at the Irish border which they viewed as hogwash, they were prepared to jump to the frontstop solution to replace the backstop, despite real qualms as to how on earth you make it operable.
But I think the EU collectively concludes from this that, come the end of 2020, the same story will play out, and that he can be induced to sell a deal stacked in their favour as a U.K. negotiating triumph, if only in order to have done with the issue politically. Or to find a different way to extend purgatory.
But on the question of whether to extend, he surely is most unlikely, just 3 months after the potential start of negotiations, already to have reached the conclusion by June that the following 6 months will not suffice.
He also knows that the moment he extends, he will be straight into a new budgetary negotiation about the U.K’s contribution over the 1 or 2 years of an extension. Which might involve eating lots of words. He further knows that the Right, which will have been strengthened inside his Party if he has won the election, will decry an extension as an intolerable prolongation of vassalage.
I should be very clear indeed here: my point is not – absolutely not – to welcome this thinking on either side of the Channel.
Far from it.
I fear it all points to a repetition next year of exactly the syndrome we have suffered for the last three. And a repetition of the myopia on which ultimately lands us with a poor and deteriorating relationship on multiple things that really matter, economically and strategically.
I am just stating the likelihood—I personally frankly think near-certainty right now—that the incentives on both players now play out this way.
Put crudely, the EU will feel that, in the time available, rather little serious can get done, and will think that is no bad thing, as it can fully exploit UK desperation to get something over the new line. Why not take advantage of yet another Prime Minister who has unwisely boxed himself in?
They are talking up a deal, not because they have become undying fans of Brexiteers but because they can see there’s an opportunity here for something that works pretty nicely in the EU’s interest.
The U.K. will think that the overwhelming political objective is to deliver “full exit” by the end of 2020 (let’s forget the little local difficulty that you told the public that you were “getting Brexit done” the year before.)
So a quick and dirty deal, with precious little substance beyond zero tariffs and quotas has appeal, despite the economic reality that the vast majority of the barriers to trade which we need to keep dismantled are the non-tariff ones. And despite the obvious fact that a tariffs and quotas only deal is obviously more in, say, French and German interests than our own
We could, as in the Spring of 2017, be on tramlines to this rather rapidly.
