Theresa May saves the day

[meridian]

I wonder how much orchestration there was between No 10 and Brussels over yesterday's "miraculous 11th hour breakthrough"?

How many days have both sides been sat on that rabbit, waiting to pull it out of the hat?

Not that long, by the looks of it. Varadkar was on his way to Washington when he was called back for the talks.

The issue from the EU side is that the U.K. are unilaterally stating that they can withdraw from the backstop. Which, of course, the U.K. has always been free to do - there’s unilaterally withdrawing, and there are consequences for unilaterally withdrawing....

The U.K. is trying (succeeding?) in minimising the consequences of unilaterally withdrawing. By putting this into a codicil and formally tying it to the Withdrawal Agreement, the danger for the EU is that if they do not object to it then they may be seen to be implicitly agreeing to it. At any future arbitration, the U.K. can point to the unilateral statement and say that the EU didn’t object at the time, therefore they accepted it.

This might be enough to get the WA through the HoC.

[BlasterBates]

Geoffrey Cox ordered to change his legal opinion to make everyone vote for the deal

It gets better. The EU's changes are clearly purely cosmetic.