Quote of the day

The Guardian on Theresa May's cri de coeur (here):

The Salzburg summit hadn’t gone very well, she began. Nothing like a statement of the obvious to get things rolling. But now she wanted to make some things very clear to the EU. Cue her best death stare. The one she usually reserves for Boris Johnson. What she was clear about was that the Chequers plan – rubbished by many Tories, dismissed by the EU leaders and without a prayer of getting through parliament – was still the plan she intended to get through parliament and get the EU to accept.

As a denial of reality it was already a bravura performance, but within minutes things had lurched into another space-time continuum. One that even Stephen Hawking could never have imagined. Everything was basically the EU’s fault. It was the EU that had forced the UK into leaving the EU. It was the EU that was making the UK confront the possibility of a hard Irish border because the UK had voted to leave. She had fallen over backwards to come up with a sensible solution and the EU had come up with none of their own. Other than, of course, to make it clear right from the start that the Canada and Norway models were the only options available and there could be no cherrypicking. Madness.