What the papers say: Theresa May’s Brexit delusion is coming unstuck

Monday night’s Brexit dinner was ‘constructive and friendly’, both sides have insisted. Yet it’s hard to tell what purpose the discussions involving the Prime Minister and Jean Claude-Junker actually served, says the Daily Telegraph. The ‘deadlock’ remains firmly in place, and ‘the best Mrs May managed to extract was that negotiations would “accelerate” in the coming months’. So what’s the hold-up? The answer lies with Brussels, says the Telegraph, which argues that ‘citizen’s rights could be sorted out tomorrow’ if the EU wanted to move things on. The ‘sequencing’ of talks – which gives the EU the justification to delay trade talks until firm agreement is made on Britain’s Brexit divorce bill – is another ‘blockage’, says the Telegraph. So whatever the EU says, ‘it is in the gift of the EU to unlock the process by showing greater flexibility’, according to the paper’s editorial and the longer things go on with no progress, Brexit talks will look more and more like a ‘matter of national honour’.