Britain seeks friends at Europe’s top table

THERESA MAY, Britain’s prime minister, arrived in Brussels on October 19th for an EU summit with a cacophony of voices in her ears. Hardliners in her Conservative Party were urging her to stick two fingers up to the intransigent Europeans and walk away from the deadlocked Brexit negotiations. Business groups and Philip Hammond, her chancellor, were growing increasingly fretful over the urgent need to agree a “transitional” deal to avoid a regulatory cliff-edge once Britain leaves the EU in March 2019. As if to rub it in, soon after Mrs May arrived Lloyd Blankfein, the CEO of Goldman Sachs, tweeted mischievously that after Brexit he expected to spend a lot more time in Frankfurt, a European rival to the City of London, Britain’s financial heart.

This week’s summit was once supposed to mark the moment when the EU would agree that the Brexit divorce talks—focused on the rights of European citizens in Britain after Brexit, the status of the Irish border and a settling of financial accounts—had made, in the words of the negotiating guidelines, “sufficient progress” for discussions to start on a post-Brexit trade deal. But the talks have become bogged down over money. Time, then, to get political. Mrs May spent the past week frantically wining, dining and phoning EU leaders and officials to unlock the negotiations. Last night she asked all 27 of them to find empathy for her domestic political plight.