Another week, another turn of the screw that tightens the ratchet of the Brexit countdown - but it is still not expected by either side to take the UK and the EU materially closer to a viable divorce deal.

That is the assumption among both European and UK negotiators as they prepare to hold talks in Brussels later this week - probably after Wednesday and a high-profile visit by the Irish Taoiseach, Leo Varadkar.

In the meantime, a cross-party group of MPs will meet in Westminster to discuss the "alternative arrangements" to the Irish backstop that MPs mandated Theresa May to seek from the EU when they voted for the Brady amendment last week.

But on both sides of the Channel, the battle lines have clearly not moved an inch - with the two sides signalling aggressively to each other over the weekend that they were digging in on their respective positions.

Technical solutions will not fix Irish border

MPs will debate the so-called Malthouse Compromise which requires the backstop that guarantees no return to a hard border in Ireland be replaced by "technical solutions" set out by Brexiteers last December in their paper A Better Deal.

Olly Robbins, the UK’s top Brexit official, has already made clear internally that this plan has absolutely no chance of being accepted by the EU which has spent two years investigating for "technical solutions" to the border without success.