Welcome to F.T. Politics, the Financial Times's podcast on British politics. I'm Sebastian Payne and in this

week's special episode it's all about Theresa May's big Brexit

speech in Florence. What did she say that was new about transition, money, the

future relationship and the state of the talks? To dissect it it I'm delighted to be joined by Alex Barker

the F.T. Brussels Bureau Chief James Blitz are White or editor and our friend Henry

Newman from the Open Europe Think Tank. Thank you all for joining. So let's just begin by asking

each you what you made of this speech. We've talked about it quite a lot on this

podcast. It's been heavily trailed and it's going to be dissected for a long

time to come.

Alex, what was your perspective on what the British Prime Minister said on Friday afternoon?

Given the background and the kind of political strife we had in the UK before this speech,

it seemed a little underwhelming, but if you look at it in terms of the dynamics of the negotiation, it actually made quite considerable the headway. I mean, and foremost six months ago if we'd been

talking about a stand-still transition that included the entire key EU

free movement budget budget contributions.

It was almost kind of unthinkable at that point, and that has been landed and the EU was moved

as well in saying, okay, we're willing to discuss that in the first stage of this rather than right at the end of the process.

So that's a serious development.

Citizen rights, it looks like a deal is being cooked.

That was another big sticking point around the ECJ. That's a big

development. On money it's short of what the EU want. They're going to wrangle for months

I suspect but the Prime Minister didn't close off the potential to negotiate and the EU will see that as encouraging.

So in terms of the divorce negotiations, I would say it's kind of rightly being cautiously

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