Hello, my name's David Ransomond, 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 finalise the deal

that will go before the House of Commons, and we are going to weigh up the prospect.

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LRB for just one pound an issue. 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, the withdrawal agreement. If you're Theresa May or

maybe Olly Robbins and negotiator, 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 there are people who want to push back in other ways.

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