It took the UK government over 2 years from the EU referendum and a full 15 months from the start of the Article 50 period to decide its Brexit position – what became known as the Chequers Deal. But then Boris Johnson and David Davis promptly resigned within days, undermining...
The latest European Council has come and gone. No progress was made on Brexit. Indeed no progress has been made for months – at least since February. Tusk and May repeated the tired soundbites that progress had indeed been made, but no-one believed it. Meanwhile news emerged that Davis has...
The superficial difference between a Hard Brexit and a Soft Brexit is political control – taking back control, to coin a phrase. A Soft Brexit leaves the UK having to abide by the rules of the Single Market or the Customs Union or both but, as a non-EU Member State,...
As anyone who has ever read this blog, or follows me on Twitter, knows, I am no fan of Theresa May or her government’s position on Brexit. So it was then not without a little surprise that I did not find myself shouting at the screen while listening to the...
Last week’s European Council in Brussels – as expected – did not agree that sufficient progress had been made on the three first stage Brexit issues (cititzens rights, financial settlement, Irish border) to allow the negotiations to move to the second stage. There were some friendly noises, but ultimately there...
https://twitter.com/BeardedGenius/status/921315451845660673 https://twitter.com/stephenkb/status/921323572643139584 What is the answer to that? Via this Buzzfeed piece I know it is an AP image. Looking through AP’s image bank you get to this. It says it was taken by Geert Vanden Wijngaert at October 20, 2017 03:47:29 AM. As AP is New York based, I...
When Theresa May delivered her Florence Speech a fortnight ago, my first reaction was “Is that it?” The speech had to outline something on citizens rights, the financial settlement to leave the EU, and on the Northern Ireland border, yet – especially on the last of these – it offered...
So Theresa May is going to make her highly awaited speech in Florence tomorrow. There has been plenty of analysis and speculation about what she is and is not going to include. Here – in a blog post I will update as more sources are available – are some of...
This morning Oliver Robbins was moved from Permanent Secretary at the Department for Exiting the EU (DExEU) to become EU Adviser to Theresa May, based in the Cabinet Office. This afternoon it was announced that DExEU’s Director of Trade and Partnerships Antony Phillipson is departing for New York. At a...
Theresa May is due to give a big Brexit speech this coming Friday 22nd September in Florence. With Boris Johnson having jumped the gun and penned his own Brexit vision a couple of days ago (fisked by me here), and with frustration on the EU side growing about the slow...
Regular readers of this blog know my own views about Brexit – seen from the UK side I have found the whole thing foolish from the start. But over the past few weeks I have been asking myself a different question: why is the Brexit process going quite so badly?...
In these febrile political times since the UK’s General Election it feels like something could break any moment in Britain’s arduous EU departure process. Rather than the inexorable track towards a Hard Brexit (with the threat of “no deal”) that looked likely prior to 8th June, the past few weeks...