With less than a week to go before the deadline set by Donald Tusk, the European council president, for Britain to come up with an acceptable offer on the financial settlement and a credible solution for the Irish border if it wants to move on to the second stage of Brexit talks by mid-December, things are starting to get a little bit squeaky …

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For reasons we’ve discussed before on this podcast, namely the EU27’s need to circulate and agree the main conclusions of their forthcoming summit before it happens on 14 and 15 December, the deadline Tusk set Theresa May expires on 4 December – which, handily, is when the prime minister is scheduled to have dinner with the president of the European commission, Jean-Claude Juncker. So if progress there is to be, that’s when we might well expect to see it.

Before then, though, a fair bit of movement is needed.



There are strong if unconfirmed rumours that a letter setting out, in broad terms, what Britain might be prepared to pay by way of the so-called divorce bill is ready to be signed by the prime minister, and the general feeling seems to be that this is the lesser of the two problems – although that may not prove true if, as is also rumoured, the government tries to make its offer conditional on getting a favourable trade deal at the end of the Brexit process.



The question of the Irish border looks, for the moment, to be the biggest single stumbling block, complicated by an unrelated scandal in the Irish government and the fact that without the backing of one of the parties with particularly strong views on the question, May’s government is also in deep trouble. The key problem here remains the fact that no one wants a hard border, but Britain’s intention of leaving the single market and the customs union means some kind of policed frontier, either across the island of Ireland or – in effect – down the middle of the Irish Sea is basically inevitable.



We also have a quick look this week at the departure of two EU agencies from London, the saga of the government’s 58 Brexit impact assessment reports, and some typically intriguing comments on what he expects to emerge from the process by Sir Ivan Rogers, the UK’s former ambassador to the EU.

With Jon Henley to figure it all out – and give us the benefit of their combined expert knowledge – are the Guardian’s Brexit policy editor, Dan Roberts, and Brussels correspondent, Jennifer Rankin.

