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Theresa May, the Prime Minister, and David Davis, the Brexit Secretary, went to Brussels and had dinner with Jean-Claude Juncker, the president of the European Commission and the EU’s chief negotiator Michel Barnier. They came up with a joint statement that ‘efforts should accelerate over the months to come’. But by this week’s meeting of the European Council, Britain was deemed not to have done enough about the price it would pay to allow the EU to discuss trade matters. No great hope was held out that it would be any better by the next meeting in December. Keir Starmer, Labour’s Brexit spokesman, said: ‘There is no way we would vote for a no deal.’ Amber Rudd, the Home Secretary, when asked about Brexit by a Commons committee, said: ‘I think it is unthinkable there would be no deal.’ Philip Hammond, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, apologised for saying in a television interview: ‘The enemy, the opponents, are out there. They’re on the other side of the negotiating table.’ Boris Johnson, the Foreign Secretary, went rowing on the lake at Chevening with Ivo Sramek, the deputy foreign minister of the Czech Republic. For a day the sun turned to blood and the sky turned orange.
In a televised press conference Andrew Parker, the head of MI5, said that 130 Britons who travelled to Iraq and Syria to fight for Isis had died. He said that the tempo of counterterrorism operations was the highest he had seen in 34 years at MI5, with 20 attacks foiled in the past four years, including seven in the past seven months. Omid Saidy, aged 20, from Fulham, London, was fatally stabbed outside Parsons Green Underground station after confronting a drug dealer, police said. The Home Office proposed a mandatory six-month prison sentence for people caught twice carrying acid in public.
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