The plan as conceived at the start of the year was for completion of a post-Brexit free trade deal at the European council summit that begins on Thursday. That is not going to happen. Even without the intervention of a pandemic, the timetable was optimistic. When Covid struck, the prudent course of action was to extend the transition period, but that option expired at the end of June.
Boris Johnson said a deal was achievable by August. Then there were threats to walk away from talks before this mid-October summit. The clauses in the internal market bill that repudiate parts of the Brexit withdrawal agreement were intended to signal the seriousness of that intent – a hardball move to prove to Brussels that the UK was ready for unilateral rupture.
But the talks have not collapsed. The summit will hear sombre but not despairing accounts of slow progress towards compromise. Talks will continue, the clock will carry on ticking. Mr Johnson’s bluff has been called. That does not mean a deal is certain, only that the prime minister’s evaluation of his own interests cause him to continue seeking one. There is growing realism in the government’s appraisal of the cost of failure, influenced to a large extent by the Treasury. Rishi Sunak does not want to antagonise Eurosceptic Tories with any public call for Brexit compromise, but the chancellor cannot ignore the additional burden that a no-deal separation would inflict on an economy assailed by a second wave of coronavirus infections.
Downing Street is also aware that resentment over Brexit fuels separatism in Scotland. Opinion polls show rising support for independence already. Getting a deal will not reverse that trend, but the messiest kind of exit bolsters Nicola Sturgeon’s claims that her country is blighted by misrule from Westminster. Those are not new considerations. The folly of a no-deal Brexit has been obvious to all but the most blinkered Eurosceptic ultras, although by a stroke of national misfortune that faction has captured the Conservative party.
The EU has consistently assumed that rationality would prevail, even in an administration led by Mr Johnson. The internal market bill shook that confidence, but not with the effect intended by Mr Johnson. He expected to jolt Europe into a new, more amenable negotiating paradigm. Instead, the bill made Brussels doubly determined to enforce guarantees of compliance in any future treaties. It needlessly poisoned the atmosphere without bringing Brexiters any closer to their fantasy of access to European markets free of obligations to satisfy EU rules.
There remains a very real prospect of talks breaking down. There are dangerous gaps to bridge on fisheries (where the EU side is pushing its luck regarding future access to British waters) and state aid (where the UK is still too fixated on an abstract conception of pristine sovereignty).
That this week’s summit has been reached without a deal is a cause for great concern, mitigated by both sides’ apparent commitment to continue talking. Goodwill has been squandered while the prime minister failed to work through the elementary calculus of risk. The case for his defence is that he had things other than Brexit on his mind. But raw self-interest is rarely far from the prime minister’s attention, and that metric has always pointed towards the need to steer hard for compromise and land the deal. The evidence of recent weeks indicates that he is reaching that conclusion, in his own way and in his own time. He needs to get there faster.
