I know it’s still a long way off, but I’ve been thinking about the October European Council as a key crunch-point for the Article 50 process. To that end, I’ve made a Powerpoint (PDF version at the bottom), plus there’s some comments in the Twitter thread I wrote on this. Happy to expand/explain thinking on […]
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The optimistic view of the round of speeches over the past weeks that culminated in Theresa May’s contribution at Mansion House is that the UK is finally confronting the consequences of the EU referendum. With both government ministers and Jeremy Corbyn devoting time to discussing and debating in more detail, this might be the point […]
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A bit of an odd month. Mostly it’s been quiet on the negotiating front, as everyone prepares for March and Phase 2. However, there has also been a flurry of activity, including the British internal discussions on the end-state of the New Relationship, the numerous speeches that have amounted to not much, and the Commission’s […]
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A good rule of thumb is that when you’re in a hole, you stop digging. Unless, of course, you’re in the tunnelling business. The British government is very much not in that line of work – such things being outsourced – so the rule would seem to apply in spades. And yet is spades that […]
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I’m back to transition arrangements once again this week, despite having got a load off my chest not that long ago. This is prompted in part by stories such as The Sun’s piece on Tuesday about the UK agreeing to end transition on 31 December 2020, as per the EU’s proposals. The story is an […]
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As a child, I used to like watching a TV programme where a bearded Australian would talk about some cartoons that he was going to show, hurriedly sketching a character in some dynamic pose. Part of the fun was the way he caught the characters’ essence: distilling them into a single image. Of course, this […]
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