Thread by @Usherwood

Possibly more for me than for you, let's try to pull this week together a bit:

1/

Let's start with the EU side

Having largely kept heads down during conference season, yesterday's Tusk/Varadkar presser demonstrated that EU is keeping the pressure on

2/

The tension seems to be between COM/EUCO and IE, as @pmdfoster explained well yesterday: IE making conciliatory noises, central EU bodies pushing EU integrity line

https://twitter.com/pmdfoster/status/1047894474209333248

3/

However, there does seem to be a bit more positivity on EU side about all this, although much hangs on what May presents as text

4/

So let's swing over to the UK

This week was mainly about survival for May: never was going to be much substantial mvt, just fending off CON pressures at #CFC18

5/

In that, she seemed to do OK: Johnson was a way off being fatal, ERG has stuck at sniping and final speech went down well (possibly because she didn't use the C word)

6/

What's less clear is whether she can switch from the party mgt thing to the Art.50 negotiation thing. In particular, can she produce text to move on the talks on Irish dimension?

7/

That's been promised since Salzburg, but it's not leaked, so either it's a super-tight circle holding it (which'll cause issues for CON buy-in later on) or it's not written yet

If it's the latter, then someone's got a very busy weekend

8/

Perhaps the thing that continues to disquiet me is the disconnect of UK-EU and internal-UK dynamics: each is aware of the other, but doesn't actively seek outcomes that can fly for them.

9/

Obviously, part of May's work is wrangling that, but she's still doing it implicitly, rather than explicitly, which means assumptions are not always getting checked or picked up

10/

A final curiosity.

Tusk flew the Canada +++ kite yesterday, in what was a very deliberate waving of red flags to the ERG types

11/

What he didn't stress (although it was said) was that this still comes with the IE backstop, which remains anathematic to those same people

12/

That still doesn't make much sense to me

https://twitter.com/Usherwood/status/1047831330942320641

13/

Partly it's about managing IE, but it's also about managing UK, clearly

14/

Part of me wants to say...

15/

...but it's such an obvious one that I can't think whether it's that simple

One to ponder over the weekend, I think

16/

So, in short, we're very much back in the saddle on talks, but if UK doesn't pony up some text ASAP then we've got some big problems

/end