17 Feb 2016

EU – having the English for breakfast?

(GERMANY OUT) A typical English fried breakfast is served in London, England (Photo by Forster/ullstein bild via Getty Images)

The Brussels summit will have an “English breakfast” on Friday morning to look at the British negotiating points, a senior EU official said this morning. That’ll be a plenary session which Donald Tusk, the European Council President who chairs the meeting, hopes will sign off on the text. 

The former Polish Prime Minister is allergic to late night, sweaty sessions of negotiations and no fan of penning in leaders after a planned finishing time (in this case, lunchtime Friday). So his plan is to explore the remaining bugs in a plenary starting at 5:45pm on Thursday and then park the issue while the dinner discussion (at 8pm) moves to migration. 

After dinner, he could see some leaders for one-on-one chats and liaise with different countries to iron out differences. The hope is that a plenary on Friday morning – the “English breakfast” the official spoke of (apologies to non-English UK citizens) – will be relatively short and not see unraveling texts and major hostilities. A challenging timetable sees the leaders then try to discuss migration some more that morning and Syria too. So getting that all done by lunchtime is ambitious. 

But there is still a chance that the whole business is done by lunchtime, leaving Mr Cameron free to rush back to London to be greeted by a flag-waving Iain Duncan Smith and Chris Grayling, who praise his achievement to the skies (or not). 

As I mentioned yesterday, other countries appear to have become interested in the Child Benefit indexation idea- and that’s making some Eastern European net exporters of labour nervous about contagion.

The officials meeting in the Berlaymont building in Brussels are leaving some areas for the leaders themselves to crunch, including what will be incorporated into future treaties, the timings and criteria for the emergency brake and how exactly the “ever closer union” exemption should be formed.

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