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The big picture

Row? What row? It wasn’t so very long ago that David Davis was predicting “the row of the summer” over the EU’s insistence that the details of the UK’s divorce from the bloc would have to be settled before any future trade deal could be discussed.

On Monday, the historic first day of Article 50 talks in Brussels, the row seems to have lasted until about lunchtime. Britain caved in, agreeing to park trade talks until progress has been made on the Brexit bill, citizens’ rights and the Irish border.

Despite Davis’s claims that what matters is “not how it starts but how it ends” and “nothing is agreed until everything is agreed”, it is hard not to see, in this almost instantaneous British climbdown, a foretaste of things to come.

Asked during their joint press conference whether the EU was ready to make any concessions of its own, the bloc’s chief negotiator, former French cabinet minister Michel Barnier, was blunt:

I am not in a frame of mind to make concessions or ask for concessions … the UK has asked to leave the EU, not the other way round, so we each have to assume the consequences of our decisions and the consequences are substantial. Please do not underestimate those consequences.

On the technicalities, it emerged that Theresa May will be in Brussels on Thursday to make a “generous” offer on EU citizens’ rights, but that issue of the border between Northern Ireland and the Republic was complex and would take more time.

Back in Britain, pressure continued to build on the severely weakened prime minister to deliver a softer form of Brexit than the one she laid out in her Lancaster House speech and Brexit white paper.



The chancellor, Philip Hammond, used his Mansion House speech on Tuesday to demand a Brexit deal that puts jobs and prosperity first, calling for a three-point plan centred on a comprehensive trade agreement, transitional deal and commitment to keep borders open:

The British people did not vote to become poorer or less secure. They did vote to leave the EU. And we will leave the EU. But it must be done in a way that works for Britain.

The governor of the Bank of England, Mark Carney, said Brexit would be bad for the British economy. Financial markets had already downgraded the UK’s economic prospects, he said, and Brexit could hit wages, jobs and prices.



In what appeared to an attack aimed at Boris Johnson, the foreign secretary, Carney said:

Before long, we will all begin to find out the extent to which Brexit is a gentle stroll along a smooth path to a land of cake and consumption.

During the 2016 EU referendum campaign, Johnson had claimed that Britain could “have its cake and eat it” after it left the EU.

The view from Europe

European leaders are increasingly fearful that May’s government is too fragile to negotiate viable terms on which to leave the bloc, possibly leading to a “brutal Brexit” under which talks collapse without any deal.

“It raises new uncertainties, and there is a big question mark about the position the UK will now take,” said Sandro Gozi, Italy’s Europe minister. One senior EU diplomat put it this way:

The risk of breakdown of talks because of a breakdown in the UK has increased … we are ready to make this work but if we don’t have a reliable and strong and stable opposite number, it puts the whole process at risk.

Guy Verhofstadt, the former Belgian prime minister who is the European parliament’s coordinator on Brexit, joined several European politicians, including French president Emmanuel Macron, in saying the UK could still change its mind and stay in the EU – albeit without the special perks:

Like Alice in Wonderland, not all the doors are the same. It will be a brand new door, with a new Europe, a Europe without rebates, without complexity, with real powers and with unity.

Meanwhile, back in Westminster

An already chaotic and worrying period in British politics took a darker turn still this week with the appalling – and, by some, long-predicted – loss of life when Grenfell Tower in west London burned fiercely, killing at least 79 people.

The huge death toll focused angry attention on how it could be possible for some of the UK’s poorer people to die in such a horrendous way in a borough where the average property sells for £1.3m.

May became a lightning rod for the anger, especially since she did not meet the now-homeless residents on her first visit to the site. One of the defining images of her tenure as PM could yet be the moment during a subsequent visit when she scurried to a waiting car, escorted by security, to cries of: “Coward!”

Adding to the sense of a rudderless administration was a delay to the state opening of parliament by two days, made necessary because May’s Conservatives had still to agree a deal with Northern Ireland’s Democratic Unionists to secure a working parliamentary majority after losing seats in the election.



While the consensus remains that May is damaged goods and must go sooner or later, no fellow Tory MP is obviously on manoeuvres, perhaps aware that the public seem sick of elections, whether leadership or general.

After a weekend of speculative headlines about May’s future, Johnson and Michael Gove spent much of Monday pleading fealty. Do they mean it? For now, probably they do.

You should also know ...

Read these

The Centre for European Reform’s Charles Grant and John Springford have a handy guide to the 10 key Brexit questions the British government really has to answer on the compromises is will inevitably have to make:

Since May’s failure to secure an overall majority, both main parties have started to consider the merits of a “softer” Brexit – one that would enable Britain to retain more economic ties with the EU than May initially planned. But neither seems willing to admit that withdrawing from the EU is going to involve painful trade-offs.

In the Guardian, Natalie Nougayrède says Britain is leaving the EU just as the mood in Europe is on the upswing:

The EU has turned a corner, and feels more confident. It wants to develop its capacities to act internationally beyond its borders – not just perpetually fix its internal problems. It has no other choice, because of its geopolitical environment … Just as Helmut Kohl and François Mitterrand seized the opportunities that history presented to them, Angela Merkel and Emmanuel Macron are, in different circumstances, identifying their path towards a common European endeavour. After a decade of crisis, Europe may now be pulling out of it.

And again in the Guardian, Marina Hyde warns that the Grenfell Tower fire disaster provides a dramatic backdrop to Brexit talks:

For the most part, Brexit was yesterday-disguised-as-tomorrow. Often it was explicitly touted as an act of regress, a desire to get back to the way things were when they mostly weren’t. I don’t want to get too lost in the rarefied language of historicalese, but the past was often shit. Horrendous, preventable things happened to people who lacked sufficient protection from the state, and the EU represented a concerted aspiration to make people safer personally as well as politically ... No one in their right mind could have imagined we’d start Brexit talks already able to glimpse the sunlit uplands Boris and co promised. But few could have suspected that on the eve of our future, we would find ourselves being borne quite so ceaselessly back into the past.

Tweet of the week

Pretty much nails it ...