If the PM’S plan is dead, is it time to call the EU’S bluff with a ‘no deal’ divorce?

The Chequers plan is dead: it was stabbed in the back by the resignations of David Davis and Boris Johnson and it has been stabbed four-square in the front by the EU.

Like the Murder on the Orient Express, the corpse of Theresa May’s Brexit strategy lies dead from wounds inflicted by many hands.

Brexiteers hate it because it leads to “vassalage” and an insufficiently independent trade policy; Remainers hate it because it damages the UK economy and does little or nothing for services; and the EU hates it because undermines the single market.

All of which begs the question: “If Chequers is dead, what then?”

Chequers as it was originally presented is dead because, at its heart, the EU rejected it as cherry-picking.

But if that version of Chequers is dead, could another version be resuscitated by further concessions?

The answer is perhaps, but to make it work these concessions would have to be deep. It would involve complete and ongoing (dynamic) alignment on goods regulations; some form of continued payments to the EU; a stronger role for the European Court of Justice (ECJ). And if the UK wants to avoid a customs border in the Irish Sea, then the thorny question of membership of a customs union needs to be addressed.

Might the UK then get an EU concession on the issue of free movement? That is an impossible question to answer now, but there are experienced diplomats who believe that at the 11th hour, they might.

But to be clear, these would be

The EU would be torn between ‘punishing’ a fellow member state, or finding a managed solution

significant concessions, which Mrs May appeared to rule out in her article in The Sunday Telegraph this weekend.

She excludes concessions that are not “in the national interest”, a definition that may become stretched as the pressure grows; she rules out “vast” payments, but not payments explicitly; and the “jurisdiction” of the ECJ, but not its binding influence.

But the Government calculates that when the negotiations reach their endgame, and Brexiteers face a choice between “getting over the line” and bringing down the guillotine on the EU, they will agree to quite a lot.

The alternative, the Government will warn its backbenches, is a chaotic “no deal” that risks poisoning the entire country against Brexit, raising food costs, driving inflation and disrupting business. Against that backdrop, might Parliament yet back Mrs May’s messy compromise at the 11th hour, as it did over the Brexit “bill” and the Irish question last December? The Government hopes so.

But if it becomes clear after the Sept 20 EU leaders’ summit in Salzburg that Mr Barnier’s hardline rejection of Chequers is shared by the 27 EU member states, what then?

If Mrs May doesn’t want to concede ground, as outlined above, to seal a deal with the EU, then there is talk from very senior Brexiteer ministers of a rapid “pivot to Canada”.

This is the Free Trade Agreement (FTA) that is also demanded by Mr Davis and Mr Johnson. It comes with two huge problems.

The first is that a Canada-style deal, even a big one, would represent “such a restriction on our mutual market access that it would benefit neither of our economies”.

The second is even thornier. Mr Johnson and Mr Davis omit to recall that that text was deeply flawed on the question of customs. It was, as the EU noted at the time, pure cakeism.

Given the UK’S commitment in December to an “invisible” border between Northern Ireland and the Republic, an FTA that takes the UK out of a customs union means that customs checks must be done somewhere. And if it is not possible to do them on the Irish border, then the EU says there must be a customs border in the Irish Sea – which Mrs May says is “unacceptable”, because it will break up the UK. Stalemate.

And the EU is playing hardball. It won’t agree a Withdrawal Agreement if it doesn’t get legal guarantees that – whatever happens – the Irish border will remain “invisible”. This is the dreaded Irish backstop.

The EU has already rejected as “magical thinking” the idea presented last August by the UK that technology can deliver invisible border checks. So should the UK call the EU’S bluff? One way to test this and see whether the EU could find solutions if it really wanted to, would be to force a “no deal”. At that point the high-stakes Irish gambit to use the border issue to force the UK to remain in the customs union will have demonstrably failed.

Given that both the UK and Irish governments will refuse to erect a border, the onus goes back on to Brussels, because it is also an EU border. The EU would then need to decide whether to find a way to “manage” that border or – if the Irish will not do checks – install checks between Ireland and the other 26.

The EU would then be torn between “punishing” a fellow member state by restricting their access to the single market, or finding a managed solution that takes into account the “unique” political circumstances of Northern Ireland, where the EU says it is heavily invested in maintaining peace.

This would be a high-stakes gamble. Relations between Brussels, Dublin and the EU26 would be sorely tested, with the Irish possibly on the wrong end of EU lectures about the integrity of the single market.