ON Wednesday we heard that the flawed Chequers deal was dead.
The word the EU’s chief negotiator actually used was “mort”, so we heard from a member of our European Select Committee, who’d met Michel Barnier on Monday.
The Committee, on which I sit, was taking oral evidence from both Brexit Secretary Dominic Raab and the Prime Minister’s chief EU adviser, Oliver Robbins.
The latter has huge influence over Mrs May and had resisted calls to attend our Committee until ordered to do so.
Of course he is a civil servant, and, as such, answerable to his political bosses, but on this issue there are suspicions he is behind the Chequers deal, which would leave us neither in nor out of the EU.
What has become clear is that Mrs May chose to ignore the Canada-style agreement that the EU would have accepted.
It resolved most of the difficulties facing negotiations now, except for the border issue in Ireland.
In many commentators’ views, this problem has been exacerbated by EU negotiators in an attempt to bring the UK to heel.
As I said to Mr Raab on Wednesday, surely it is time for the UK to stand firm rather than capitulating at every twist and turn.
A firm Brexiteer himself, I do not envy his position.
He must surely see that the Chequers deal is dead in the water.
Should Mrs May’s proposal be accepted, it will leave the UK as rule-takers rather than rule-makers, severely threatening our ability to make trade deals with other countries.
And don’t be fooled into thinking that Chequers would only be a temporary fix while further negotiations continued.
With no Article 50 to fall back on, we’d be trapped in no-man’s land.
Chuck Chequers.