Another Brexit deadline has come and gone. The Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and Boris Johnson have just announced that the negotiations will continue despite the talk that today marked a hard stop for the negotiations. Strikingly, they haven’t set a new deadline for when the talks have to conclude suggesting that they may go on for some time yet and that the end of the transition period on 31 December is now the only deadline that really counts.
The tone of the Johnson / von der Leyen joint statement is notably more upbeat than the briefing that followed their Wednesday night dinner. It calls their conversation today ‘useful’; von der Leyen called it ‘constructive and useful’ in her televised statement. Their decision to characterise continuing negotiations as the ‘responsible’ thing to do suggests that the geo-political consequence of no agreement being reached are beginning to sink in.
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