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One of the many perversities of Brexit is that while the House of Commons will have to vote on any new EU trade deal, if there is no deal then there will be no opportunity for the Commons to approve or reject that particular future, short of re-opening the existing laws enacting Brexit. So even if they wanted to, Labour would not be able to instruct the government to reach a deal. This is in stark contrast to the situation before the last election when the Commons did that very thing, with a bill sponsored by Hilary Benn, which became the Benn Act. That was then swept away when Boris Johnson won his large majority a year ago.    Sir Keir Starmer only has the option of voting on any new trade deal that is reached. As ever, he has a choice. The indications are that he will ask his MPs to vote for the deal irrespective of its terms similar my because it is inherently preferable to no deal, even if it’s a scrawny and sorry affair. They argument there is compelling to him.  If he wanted to cause trouble for the government and add to the pressure on Johnson in a rather bloody-minded way he could whip Labour to reject the deal because it is flawed and tell ministers to go back and get a better deal and extend the transition period. This is what sometimes happened to Theresa May, when her rebels sided with the opposition. But now there is no time and Johnson has purged virtually all of the Europhiles on the Tory benches. The result would very likely be no deal, with the Labour partly responsible. Such a prospect would prompt a huge rebellion and chaos in his own party. It was never a possibility. More

Given that the Boris-Ursula dinner date didn’t go so well, and that neither side has (at least publicly) shifted their negotiating remit or “red lines”, it may be a mystery as to why the UK-EU talks are staggering on into the weekend – and possibly longer. Despite the fact that, in their separate statements, Boris Johnson and EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen indicated a decision would be made soon (“the end of the weekend” for Johnson, “Sunday” for von der Leyen), the British foreign secretary, Dominic Raab tellingly left the door open for them to continue even longer. Raab said the trade talks were “unlikely” to go beyond Sunday, but how many “unlikely” things have happened in the past year? After all it is only a year since the British election campaign when Johnson declared there was “zero chance” of a “no-deal Brexit”.One obvious reason for the continuing willingness to go over the same old arguments is that, as Johnson says “hope springs eternal”, and there is much at stake. Another is that both sides are terrified of getting the blame for ultimate failure, and both are going out of their way to sound reasonable. Both agree compromise on both sides is needed. Both repeat they want a deal, “but not at any price”, most recently restated by Angela Merkel. Both carefully refer to the other side as “our friends”. Both sides, in fact, have their own political pressures and have no wish to add to their problems by seeming to be responsible for a historic “failure of statecraft”, in the prime minister’s terms.   More

Ministers, not least Mr Hancock, must hope so. Public approval for the way they have handled the crisis has steadily declined since the spring, taking a particular hit after May when the revelations about Dominic Cummings’s behaviour enraged many. It had a broader political effect too: the Conservative Party’s lead over Labour shrank by some 9 percentage points and confidence in the government’s handling of the pandemic slumped. The “Dominic Cummings Effect” had a pronounced and lasting effect.  Since then a succession of lockdowns, tiering systems, the exams fiasco, testing setbacks, confused messaging, a gradually rising death toll and the second Covid wave has seen the government’s ratings fall still further. The latest polling, from King’s College London and Ipsos Mori suggests that two-thirds of people think the government failed to prepare properly for the second wave, and for the first time more than half the population distrust the government’s response to the pandemic, despite the high profile of liked and respected experts such as Jonathan Van-Tam, the deputy chief medical officer for England. The public may have had some of its faith in experts restored during this crisis. A majority of the country thinks that the government’s performance has been a national humiliation. In Scotland, public attitudes towards Boris Johnson are especially harsh, and he has famously underperformed Nicola Sturgeon, even before he decried devolution as a “disaster”.   More

After four and a half years of circuitous discussions, dozens of broken deadlines and a long but decidedly unproductive telephone call, can Boris Johnson’s face-to-face meeting with EU Commission president Ursula von der Leyen break the deadlock?  The decision by the British government to cancel some clauses in the Internal Market Bill and the Taxation Bill certainly helps. This move came as the parallel talks on the implementation of the Northern Ireland Protocol ended in (apparent) success. This was in fact unfinished business from the  withdrawal agreement reached last year and ratified in principle this year. The EU believed that the British government’s behaviour suggested bad faith, while the British found the EU’s insistence on checks across the Irish Sea frustrating and impractical. At least for now those arguments seem to have been dissolved, and chicken sandwiches can be delivered to supermarkets in Strabane without provoking a diplomatic incident or a return of the Troubles.There is also the pressure of time, the continuing Covid pandemic and the longstanding pleas of business people that are propelling the two sides to compromise.   More

Humiliation; party splits; a long recession; ridicule… the pressures on Boris Johnson to achieve a trade deal with the EU are very well known. Perhaps the only detail still missing is what his fiancee Carrie Symonds will say about the new fishing quotas and the role of the European Court of Justice. No doubt it will be leaked in due course.  Yet while Brexit isn’t obsessing most of Europe in the way it has preoccupied Britain, there are still jobs and national pride at stake, and European leaders face their own domestic Brexit-related challenges.  Thus far only President Macron has allowed talk of a national veto being applied to any Frost-Barnier accord. Maybe it is just for show and to demonstrate how hard he is fighting for les pecheurs (his government has privately advised the French fishing industry to brace itself for change); but a “non” to British ambitions has been used before, albeit in the other direction. General de Gaulle twice refused British membership, in 1961 and 1967, and when Britain finally signed up in 1972, the French people (not the British) had a referendum on the enlargement of the European Community.   More