Welcome to In Conversation, the regular podcast from Esharp magazine, go to esharp.com.

For free access to all our podcast to date.

This is Paul Adamson and I'm in conversation with Peter Foster.

Peter Foster is the Europe editor of the Daily Telegraph.

Peter, it's now the end of the summer holidays. People are back to school, back at their desks. So let's use at least

part of this podcast, if you don't mind, to sort of catch up where we stand. Just before the

summer, the Prime Minister, Treason May, published the Chequers paper,

which is the official position of the Government Design Standard,

on the future relationship between the UK and the European Union post-Brexit.

But as soon as it was published, as you know, much better than I do,

it seemed to be attacked on all sides.

So from your point of view, what is the status of this Chequers proposal?

Well, Chequers as proposed, I think, is pretty clearly dead.

There were lots of bits of Chequers.

The Chequers covered the way that the Brits saw the regulatory alignment piece between the UK and the EU economies go,

which, of course, they'd left out of the customs paper

that they produced in June. And it's pretty clear that the EU is not happy with that.

The regular, the alignment, particularly things like environments, social protections, etc., the Brits

have said it won't be any worse than it is now, but the Europeans, I think,

will push for more dynamic alignment, so we'll keep in lockstep. So we covered the alignment piece,

but of course the biggest problem with Checkers is the customs arrangement. It still clings to this

idea that we could have a dual tariff arrangement where we pay tariffs on stuff going into the EU,

...