Hello my name is David Ronserman and this is Talking Politics. This time last week we weren't entirely sure if Theresa May would still be Prime Minister when we recorded today's episode well she is and she's going to spend the next two days trying to finalize the deal that will go before the House of Commons and we are going to weigh up the prosperous.

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We have with us today Helen Thompson, Professor of Political Economy, Chris Bickerton, Reader in European Politics and it's a pleasure to welcome Kenneth Armstrong who is Professor of European Law and he's also the author of a book called Brexit Time.

Leaving the EU, it's got the brave subtitle Why, How and When, All Good Questions. I'm not sure we still know the answer to any. It doesn't have weather which we might get onto.

Who, who's going to do the deed? We could keep going. We're probably going to focus on I guess the How. One way to frame the politics of this is it's an argument about how broad the spectrum of possibility was or is in securing this stage of the deal with draw agreement.

If you're Theresa May or maybe Oli Robbins and a Go-Shaytote I think you effectively want to say that the range of the possible is this.

This is the best deal and once we arrived at this we had ruled out all the other possibilities but the critics of course are trying to say that there are other ways to go other paths we could go down and one of the questions is when did we miss the path.

Kenneth what's your sense of it with what we have now and she's going off to Europe today to try and fiddle around the edges and we're hearing things from Europe that they're not going to be able to do.

There are people who want to push back in other ways but what's your sense of how broad the spectrum of possibility was or is. How many other deals were there other than this one.

I think it's worth bearing in mind that we have had a draft of the withdrawal agreements in March and it's been a fairly developed draft of that.

The last but has really just been around about the Northern Ireland backstop and working out what the economic arrangements for the future were going to be.

So really most of the negotiations over the summer and into the autumn have been about that and I think there's been a bit of a realization at some point that instead of trying to work out what the backstop would be and then hoping they get around to working out what the future would look like.

I think they've done a lot more about working on what the future would look like and then realizing that that could work as a kind of version of the backstop.

It was always going to be hard to try and they could see two different things, a backstop and a future relationship. So I think that's kind of where they got to.

So in a way you say there's actually more in this than meets the eye because of course the other thing that Theresa May is going to want to try and say to get this through the commons is that there's still a whole range of possible futures out there.

This is just the first stage in a process back me on this and then we'll have another go but you're saying that actually the future has been quite curtailed by what's in this.

I think if you read both the provisions in the backstop protocol and you read the outline of the political declaration there is very close into play between the two.

The outline of the political declaration talks about building upon the single customs territory that is in the backstop so it is clear to me or at least I think that there is quite a close connection between those two things.

And in that sense the rest of the stuff is going to be on whether the summit is going to look out on Sunday is the rest of the things what else to put into this future agreement.

Chris, what's your sense of the spectrum of possibility here?

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