Hello and welcome back to Coffee House Shots, our political podcast. I'm Robert Ingas and I'm today joined by James Forsyth and Katie Balls.

Geoffrey Cox is off to Dublin with Theresa May. What are we expecting to see happen, James?

It's obviously going to be one topic for discussion and that is going to be the backstop. I think it is quite

interesting that these discussions are even taking place. The Irish have been very resistant to the

idea of sitting down to discuss the backstop directly with the British because they feel that

they're in the best position when this is an EU-UK negotiation rather than a UK-Rland negotiation.

And the Irish are very keen to stress that this isn't

some kind of bilateral negotiation on the backstop. But I think the fact that Jeffrey Cox, the

attorney general, is going as well as Theresa May indicates there is something going on here, which is,

you know, what legal changes could there possibly be that might offer some assurance to one side or the other.

And I think so I think that is the kind of crucial thing.

I think Theresa May has had an odd week this week in that I think she has made some progress,

but she's obviously hit some new road bumps.

I think the new road bump is that Jeremy Corbyn and the EU are in a very similar

place, which is the way to solve the backstop is to rewrite the political declaration to point

to a customs union and this very close to use Labour's phrase, single market relationship,

relationship with a single market in inverted commons. And that makes things difficult for

the reason may because the view in Brussels is, well, that's your parliamentary majority. Why don't you just, why don't you Brits with your adversarial politics just get all continental and consensual and do this with a kind of cross-party deal? Yes, I think the progress she's made is that when she went to Brussels, they didn't slam the door on her face. There will be more talks.

May and Juncker will meet again before the end of this month.

And I think the other bit of progress is there is now some talks both between May and

Varadka and also between Cox and his opposite number, which I think the UK will try and

use to tease out what might be acceptable to Ireland on the backstop,

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