Why does the EU have to keep saying it won’t renegotiate the Brexit deal?

Since last year, the European Union has said it won’t renegotiate Theresa May’s Brexit deal. Yet the message doesn’t seem to be getting through in Westminster. All the Conservative Party leadership contenders to replace the prime minister have suggested some kind of changes.

For Brussels, the matter is closed. It has split up the team that negotiated the deal, and sent Sabine Weyand, Michel Barnier’s deputy, to work for another part of the European Commission.

Jean-Claude Juncker said most recently at the June European Council that EU member states were “unanimous” that there would be no further talks on it, and that there would be nothing new. Before that in March he said he was “crystal clear”. Similar warnings stretch back into antiquity, ad infinitum. The studiousness with which Westminster has ignored the EU’s position is incredible.

The EU says it has already made concessions to the UK: it changed its original Northern Ireland backstop proposal to a new design that the British government asked for. Later in the process it issued a couple of rounds of “clarifications” in a bid to help the PM out politically.

But above all, the EU has looked at the issues for years now, and simply does not believe there is another way to solve the problems of Brexit within both sides’ red lines. They’ve minimised checks as much as possible, moving them inland, kept the border open, and maintained the integrity of the single market. Proposals from Brexiteers are mostly seen as non-existent (technology) or bordering on conspiracy theories (claimed about the Gatt treaty).

The UK also isn’t seen as a reliable negotiating partner. Theresa May took her deal back to the Commons and then, when faced with immediate opposition to it, tried to go back to Brussels and get changes, despite being explicitly told that there would not be any.

On top of that, they just have other things to deal with and want the issue over and done with, having dedicated a lot of bandwidth to it over the last two or more years.

It’s important to separate out the withdrawal agreement from the political declaration for the future relationship. The withdrawal agreement is what the Tories want to change: they want to get rid of the backstop, which is part of that agreement.

The future relationship is different. Labour’s proposals to add a customs union or single market alignment to the deal would be acceptable – the member states and Michel Barnier have said as much. The EU says these proposals could be added within a few days of talks. The government does not appear interested, however.

We can’t know for sure what will happen in October when the UK’s time is set to run out. But the noises coming out of member states now are that another extension can only be for a general election or a second referendum, if the UK decides that it wants either of those things. Not an extension to just mess around a bit. And there can be no extension for “more talks”, because the EU won’t have any talks.

This is a difficult question to answer: to an outsider it looks inexplicable, bordering or denial of reality. Partly, the issue is that Westminster is very inward-focused: information from outside is treated as of secondary importance. So when the man likely to become the next prime minister says he’s going to renegotiate the deal, he is treated with some credibility – not laughed out of the room, as he might be elsewhere.

Another aspect of it is that party politics is prioritised: so Johnson and others will say what they need to impress the Tory membership and MPs. The incentive is to say they can do better than Theresa May.