The pillars of May’s Florence speech start to crumble

Monday night’s dinner between May, Davis, Juncker and Barnier has supposedly been in the diary for some time.

For what it’s worth, Downing Street and Brussels agree on that - in perhaps a unique example of Brexit entente.

But the fact that the dinner was a secret till Sunday night cannot but create the expectation that it is a life-and-death moment to our cumbersome process of leaving the EU.

Again both sides say there is no way that deal-or-no-deal is on the menu, for the simple reason that we already know that Friday’s summit will be characterised by collective whistling in the gloom for comfort - in that the draft council conclusions leaked last week make crystal clear that inadequate progress has been made on settling the size of the divorce bill and the rights of migrants.

It is inconceivable that on either front sufficient progress will have been made by the end of this week to allow talks to start on a UK/EU trade deal or on a temporary transition period when we’ll become non-voting EU members.

In fact the truculence of Germany and France suggests that it may be naive to hope - as May and Davis do - that the breakthrough on bill and migrants will even be made in time for December’s meeting of the European Council.

Worse than that, May will almost certainly learn on Monday night that two of the pillars of her recent Florence speech - that a comprehensive trade deal can be concluded by March 2019 and that the two-year transition thereafter would be purely to implement an agreement but NOT to negotiate and conclude that agreement - are made of straw not marble.

She will be told in no uncertain terms by Juncker and Barnier that even if talks on our future relationship with the EU were to start in January - which as I say is by no means certain - that relationship is seen by EU governments and officials as fraught with complexities and difficult-to-resolve issues of principle.

So for what it’s worth, the proposals in our recent position papers on everything from data flows to customs checks are seen as naive and unworkable - largely because we are perceived as not having accepted that we are to become a third party, a stranger to them, no longer a member of the family.

My powerful impression is that the rest of the EU sees the UK government as less hostile than it was, but considerably more muddled.

And the risk for the prime minister, which presumably she knows, is that the moment she brings clarity where today there is ambiguity - on what transition actually means, on how much we pay on divorce, on the role of the European Court of Justice in settling the rights of migrants - she will alienate either the rest of the EU or half her own party.

There will be no Brexit without an almighty political crisis, whose form is yet to be determined.