This is the BBC.

Oh dear, oh dear, oh dear. Rarely can so carefully a choreographed plan have gone so comprehensively wrong.

The idea was simple. Theresa May would come back from the summer to sell her checkers plan,

to sell it is the only plan on the table. The only one that would deliver the referendum

mandate that could get back in Europe and could get through Parliament too.

Just listen to how they talked in the Prime Minister's study when the Brexit negotiating top

team were filmed for panorama. Yeah, I mean they'd been completely clear

from this sort of the white paper was a game changer there. There's a real sense over the summer

that the argument you've been making for some time that the rest of Europe's agenda does have

a bearing on Brexit and vice versa is beginning to get some traction. That was all he robins

the Prime Minister's chief EU negotiator who's now being blamed by many in the Tory party

for leading his Prime Minister astray. There's no doubt though that he, that other diplomats,

that the Prime Minister herself did really believe that checkers had broken the log jam of negotiations,

that up until the production of it the EU were offering simply two options,

a Canada free trade deal or a Norway close alignment to the EU membership of what's called

the EEA. Their belief was that the Salzburg Summit would react with warmth, not a deal but the

sniff of a deal and that would be enough to get her through the Tory party conference.

What they didn't expect was an almighty public rebuff, leaving the Prime Minister looking

and sounding rattled. Look, I'm negotiating and I'm negotiating hard in the interests of the

British people. Yes, concerns have been raised, I want to know what those concerns are,

there's a lot of hard work to be done but I believe that there is a willingness to do a deal

but let nobody be in any doubt that as I've always said, we are preparing for no deal.

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