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“Boris Johnson has been trying to convince his Tory colleagues that negotiations have advanced in the last week or so and that there’s a possible breakthrough on the way, but it seems to me that very few if anyone believes that this is the case,” Agata Gostyńska-Jakubowska, a senior research fellow at think-tank the Centre for European Reform. “What you hear in Brussels and in the European capitals is quite a lot of frustration.”

"Lo que siempre se ha asumido en los círculos de Bruselas es que sólo se concederá otra prórroga, que sería ya la tercera, si hay un cambio en la situación de Reino Unido. Un cambio en la posición negociadora o bien un cambio electoral. Las elecciones serían una justificación muy importante para conceder esa prórroga", relata a EL ESPAÑOL Camino Mortera, investigadora del Centre for European Reform (CER).

"While Italy's new government will improve the mood between the EU and Rome, there's little room for pro-Europeans to be complacent. First of all, the government may not last long. The Five Star Movement and Democratic Party have spent the last few years attacking each other and it will be difficult to establish trust," Luigi Scazzieri, a research fellow at the Centre for European Reform think tank, wrote in a note on Thursday.

On the opposite end of the Brexit debate, Sam Lowe of the Centre for European Reform says the “guilty secret of trade” is that in terms of the long-term economic impact most trade agreements amount to “little more than rounding errors”.

“It’s actually the opposite,” said Christian Odendahl, Berlin-based chief economist at the Centre for European Reform, a research institution. “There has been a slight hardening, a tendency among Germans to say, ‘Let’s at least end this uncertainty and let the Brits go their own way.’”