Meanwhile back in the land of the sane (that's not the UK obviously)
Tony Connelly @tconnellyrte
Are we any closer to a breakthrough in the Brexit negotiations? Here’s my take on another bruising week.
www.rte.ie/amp/1077263/?__twitter_impression=true
Brexit: The perils of progress on the backstop
Quotes from article
One source described the ideas as "totally insane".
And
"What they're putting forward don’t even meet any of the three objectives in the backstop," said one official.
And
A senior EU official said: "The Barclay speech was designed to be provocative, divisive and misleading."
And
"We have four weeks before the European Council and we don’t have the slightest concrete element to work on," says a senior EU official.
And
"[London] had done such a good job of talking up the idea that, at the very least, they were prepared to live with no deal," says a senior Irish official, "that a lot of people felt that's what they actually want. So what was the point of negotiating?"
And
"If we got a deal, maybe this group and then that group might come on board. But they would probably only do so if they were sure the other groups did it as well. No-one will move unless they’re 100% confident that the deal will pass. They would look stupid if they moved only for the deal to fail."
And this significant bit
Robbins has been replaced by David Frost, an old hand in Brussels but who is of different outlook and temperament.
But more importantly, the reporting structures have changed.
Olly Robbins was given a degree of negotiating leeway by Theresa May. He reported directly to her, and to Number 10. May’s cabinet, made up as it was of former Remainers such as Philip Hammond and Greg Clark, was there to endorse what she was putting forward, based on her back and forth with Robbins.
However, David Frost is under much tighter constraints, not from Boris Johnson alone but from the Brexit cabinet subcommittee, known as XS.
That sub-committee, headed by Johnson but also including hardliners Michael Gove and Dominic Raab, has a greater steering role than the previous cabinet in how the negotiations are conducted.
"You’re talking about former Conservative hopefuls," says one EU source. "They all have reputations. They all have to think about what comes next. They all have Brexiteer credentials which matter to them."
That limits the room for manoeuvre for British negotiators, with the parameters being set, according to the source, by the "electoral reality and what the Tory electoral market will bear".