A year-long delay could extinguish Brexit

Gloss it as they may, if EU leaders force a Brexit delay of a year on the UK, contrary to the request from Theresa May – as the EU president Donald Tusk wants – then they will have made a momentous judgement that will cause an earthquake, for us and them.

They would be sending a signal that they have lost all confidence in the UK Prime Minister – and probably any UK prime minister – securing parliamentary approval of the Brexit divorce settlement, the Withdrawal Agreement, that they painfully negotiated over two years.

The point is that a delay of a year would remove all pressure on equivocal MPs of all, or any, party to agree a Brexit compromise. And those equivocal MPs are the majority. Any urgency to the current talks with Labour – which already looked like a fig leaf for both sides – would dissipate.

Although the theoretical risk of a no-deal Brexit would remain, to all practical purposes it would have vanished.