Press

But as Sam Lowe of the Centre for European Reform says: “It’s right that politicians should return one more time to the basic question confronting us and ask whether we really want to go through with this deal on its economic merits.”

“The imperative for UK food exports in the event of no deal is ensuring that they can still access their most important market, the EU,” said Sam Lowe, the trade policy expert at the Centre for European Reform think-tank.“While the temptation to fiddle with domestic regulations will certainly be there, dynamic alignment in the short to medium term is just common sense.”

For financial services, in which the UK has a large surplus, this is bleak, with the Centre for European Reform, a think-tank, reckoning that a free trade agreement would shrink exports to the EU by almost 60 per cent.

Analyst at think-tank the Centre for European Reform Camino Montera-Martinez said: “Extraditing own nationals is a perk of the European Arrest Warrant, only open to EU members, and once Britain leaves the EU, it may cause serious legal and constitutional headaches in several capitals.“Whether there is a deal or not, EU countries are free to refuse to send their own nationals to Britain and I expect some will make us of that freedom.”

“Extraditing own nationals is a perk of the European Arrest Warrant, only open to EU members, and once Britain leaves the EU, it may cause serious legal and constitutional headaches in several capitals,” said Camino Montera-Martinez, an analyst at the Centre for European Reform, a think-tank.“Whether there is a deal or not, EU countries are free to refuse to send their own nationals to Britain and I expect some will make us of that freedom.”

“There is a tradition in the E.U. of things being settled at the last minute,” said Charles Grant, director of the Centre for European Reform. He noted that the Maastricht summit in 1991, for instance, came together at the last minute, and that the seven-year EU budget seems to be settled right before the deadline.

Franco-Italian friction From migration to the euro, Luigi Scazzieri at the Centre for European Reform charts the deterioration in Franco-Italian relations in the last year and why Rome will ultimately be the big loser: “Less frequent dialogue means relations are already damaged: in 2018, Italy and France did not hold an annual bilateral summit, as they usually do. And a planned ‘Quirinale Treaty’, an Italian-French pact modelled on the Élysée Treaty and designed to provide bilateral relations with more structure, is now frozen.”

“Donald Trump is less restrained in his foreign policy now than he was,” said Sophia Besch, a defence and security specialist at the Centre for European Reform think-tank. “The situation is particularly difficult for Germany. Berlin is Trump’s favourite target — but the mood between Paris and Berlin is also at a low point.”