Stefaan De Rynck - Adviser for Outreach and Think Tanks and Senior Advisor to Michel Barnier, Brexit Task Force November 2016 –

There was a worry on the EU side that the UK was putting itself on a track which would increase the chances of no deal, and that the EU had to help the UK to face the trade-off that this Brexit project would inevitably lead to. [...] And preserving the integrity of the Single Market, the integrity of the Union’s legal order and the autonomy of the decision making structure of the EU, and resisting equivalence, the mutual recognition scheme, the three baskets, managed divergence and all the concepts that popped up around that time which were expressions of that bespoke model, was a strategically important choice to make on the. [...] That’s the kind of language the UK used that it was in our ‘mutual interest’ and therefore in the interest of the EU to compromise here, that kind of language. [...] UKICE: What did you make of the parallel shenanigans in British politics, with the passing of the Benn Act which meant that the Government had to go back to Parliament for it to leave with no deal, and the prorogation and the Supreme Court case? Did that make you think that the UK was desperate to do a deal? SDR: No. [...] The fact that the backstop was a bridge to the future was no longer something that we had to deal with, in terms of the logic of what we were creating.