Painted into a corner

Lots of brown trousers as an important meeting on Brexit looms for the weekend. May is apparently about to decide on actual proposals about customs and trade.

Hardly any of the journalisti seem confident the plan will succeed. Internal divisions will squash it or the EC will reject it. Only a Times columnist (link only available to subscribers) seems to have seen that the whole mess arose from the UK Government's lack of any sort of exit plan.

For M Kettle of the Guradinan there is now a direct choice between soft Brexit a la May or no deal, and in reality:

This means, therefore, that only the first of the two choices [soft]  is in fact a serious option. If the cabinet rejects May’s and Hammond’s approach and adopts a no-deal option as government policy, there would be both a parliamentary and an extra-parliamentary revolt against it. Large businesses such as British Airways might relocate to Europe. Labour might even find an explicit anti-Brexit voice. One way or another, the no-deal approach would therefore explode on the launch pad. And Brexit might even not take place.

It is not clear why Brexit would not take place -- a sudden Labour conversion, thinks Kettle, presumably followed by a general election in which Remain MPs dominate. A revolt followed by a military coup backed by 'business' and tanks flying the EU flag?

However, even if softies get their way

The European commission negotiator Michel Barnier has consistently – and accurately – argued the EU’s rules-and-law-based approach: that the institutions are indivisible and that bespoke deals of the sort that Britain talks about would infringe them. There is not much reason to suppose that this is going to change radically in the time available to meet the article 50 deadline next March.

The only possibility is that

at the 11th hour of the Brexit process, the clock will be stopped and the wheeling and dealing will kick in. This expectation underlies May’s entire approach at Chequers on Friday. It’s why on Thursday May is meeting Angela Merkel, who is still seen as possessing the power to knock heads together and make deals.

I think this is likely too, for what that is worth, with 'business' having prepared for business as usual long ago, but if it happens, what implications will follow for lovers of the EU/EC? The lofty principles of the 4 freedoms are up for grabs after all? The principled stand based on law will dissolve into horse-trading? And above all that soft positions will look like misunderstanding of realpolitik, like appeasement -- Kettle and his colleagues will look like softies who brought a copy of the Guardain to a fistfight.