Welcome to the Guardian’s weekly Brexit briefing, bringing you the top stories of the past week in Brexitland arranged in a way that might – hopefully – allow you to make some sense of them.

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Top stories

In the run-up to a challenging Conservative party conference, Theresa May was supposed to have left last week’s EU summit in Salzburg boosted by warm words on the acceptable bits of her Brexit plan (security) and a diplomatic silence on the rest (economic and trade relations). It didn’t quite work out like that.

The prime minister angered her EU27 counterparts with an opinion piece in Die Welt and ill-judged comments at breakfast and dinner arguing, essentially, that Chequers was the only credible plan on the table and the bloc would just have to take it or leave it. They decided (or, to be accurate, confirmed) they would leave it.

So May left what the British press called a “disastrous” summit roundly “humiliated” (the continental press preferred “sent packing”) as the EU27 publicly trashed her proposals. The European council president, Donald Tusk, said bluntly they “will not work”; the French president, Emmanuel Macron, called Brexiters “liars”.

May said, of course, that the EU’s unusually harsh words were just another negotiating tactic and came out fighting the next day, saying in a combative televised address that the EU was to blame for the impasse and that she and her government deserved to be treated with respect. That went down as well, as you might imagine.

Loyalists insisted the plan, or a single market in goods and food but not services, was workable despite its rejection by the EU and much of May’s own party; Jeremy Hunt warned British politeness should not be mistaken for weakness; and Dominic Raab ruled out a snap election, saying the Salzburg debacle was only “a bump in the road”.

But with the Irish border question no closer to being resolved until the UK accepts some kind of special status for Northern Ireland (which May reiterated she would “never agree to”), many observers thought a no-deal Brexit was more likely.

Meanwhile, the Labour party at its conference in Liverpool was set to commit to seeking a “people’s vote” on the final deal if it cannot get a general election – although senior figures disagree about what the question on the ballot paper should be.

With polls showing 86% of party members want a second referendum and Labour having confirmed it will almost certainly vote against anything that resembles Chequers, an under-pressure Jeremy Corbyn agreed to “keep all options open”.

The shadow Brexit secretary, Keir Starmer, confirmed the party had not ruled out an option to remain in the EU, although the shadow chancellor, John McDonnell, said any vote could only be on the deal itself.

What next?

The Guardian political correspondent Jessica Elgot has a fine summary of where Salzburg leaves the various UK pro- and anti-Brexit clans. As far as Brussels and the EU27 are concerned, though, things are expected to get worse before they get better.

In one sense, of course, Salzburg did not change much: the EU27 have long said the key trade planks of Chequers will not work, while the Irish backstop will clearly remain the number one obstacle to any agreement until May drops her insistence that any solution must apply to the whole of the UK.

The bloc is counting on Britain rewriting its red lines when push really comes to shove and it is confronted with the imminent prospect of a no-deal Brexit. They could well be right and, as the Centre for European Reform’s John Springford and Sam Lowe write, there are ways for May to do that without “breaking up” the UK.

But what happened in Salzburg is a reminder of how badly things can go wrong when tone and messaging are off; relations seem to have soured further with May’s talk of “respect” last week; and negotiations could well drag on even beyond November. It also seems certain they will become more fraught, not less.

At least, however, the prime minister has won a temporary truce in her cabinet. There was no rebellion at a crunch meeting on Monday at which ministers agreed a post-Brexit immigration plan favouring skilled workers, with no preferential access to the UK labour market for EU citizens. Now she has to survive conference.

Best of the rest

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In the Guardian, British Influence’s Jonathan Lis argues that the rejection of the Chequers plan at Salzburg was no surprise – the EU will never accept a fudge on the Irish border:

The EU knows it holds all the cards and recognises the danger of giving ground. Its priority is to accommodate Dublin, not London. The British government has never understood the Brexit process. It expects the EU to treat the UK both as an equally powerful third country, and as a member state still deserving the EU’s protection. It is neither. And so in a battle of red lines, the UK will lose.

And Pauline Bock says that for her and millions like her, Brexit will turn home turf into a foreign land:

On 29 March 2019, 3.7 million Europeans will officially join the ranks of the “foreign” living in Britain. Post-Brexit Britain will in a way be egalitarian: a hostile environment for everyone who isn’t British. Maybe it’s only fair that Europeans discover what being treated as a “migrant” in western democracies feels like. Yet Brexit is unique: what used to be home for European citizens has ceased to be.

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A view from Berlin …