For the past 24 hours, there has been a power struggle between the Prime Minister and her Brexit Secretary, David Davis. Theresa May – or rather her officials – had been insisting that a backstop plan for keeping open the Ireland border would not be amended, to include a sunset clause and formal end date for the backstop. Davis said he would quit in the absence of an end date. She caved. According to sources close to Davis, ‘the backstop paper has been amended and expresses, in much more detail, the time-limited nature of our proposal’.
So to be clear, there is now a termination date in May’s backstop proposal. That almost certainly means she faces a double defeat – because the EU will reject any plan that includes an end-date. Or to put it another way, for May there is no victory, at all, in this defeat.
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