The other one in the Times is better and much longer. It is also behind a paywall but I read it on another [free] site and will copy it here. It appears to be too long for one post so I will post some in this post and the rest in another.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/inside-story-of-how-the-brexit-deal-was-done-3qb5sm7x2Inside story of how the Brexit deal was doneThe torturous twists and turns in 11 months of talks to forge a future relationship with the EUIt began 11 months ago in the splendour of the old naval college in Greenwich as Boris Johnson laid out his uncompromising vision for a new relationship with Europe to a packed audience of EU ambassadors, officials and ministers.
Today it ended — without even the opportunity for a handshake — following a marathon session of near continuous socially-distanced negotiations in London and Brussels.
Many had predicted that even without the disruption of Covid-19 such an agreement would prove impossible to reach in so short a time.
As deadlines came and went even the negotiators sometimes gave up hope. Enduring 16-hour days of talks in a windowless subterranean conference centre dubbed “the bunker”, many privately feared that the differences were simply too big to be bridged.
Yet in the end — in the time-honoured EU tradition — exhaustion, a looming deadline, and a real cliff edge to look over unlocked compromises and red lines breached on both sides.
So how did the deal that will affect all of our lives for many years to come, get done?
Although Mr Johnson officially began Brexit negotiations with his speech in Greenwich, behind the scenes preparations for the talks had started from the moment the Conservatives sealed their historic election victory in December.
Lord Frost, Mr Johnson’s chief Brexit negotiator, was determined to avoid what he saw as the mistakes of Theresa May and her negotiating strategy.
He believed Sir Olly Robbins, who had led the talks for the prime minister, had allowed the EU to take the initiative and “hold the pen” at key moments in the negotiations.
The old regime was seen as ill prepared and rudderless — driven by the political contortions of a weak and divided government.
This time, Lord Frost insisted, it must be different.
Before the prime minister’s Greenwich speech, all the “workstream”-level negotiators in the UK team began road-testing arguments and proposals.
Gone was the Robbins/May focus on trying to reproduce the “frictionless” trade of alignment to the single market and customs union. In came an objective that put independence and sovereignty to the fore in a relationship to be defined as one between Britain and EU as “sovereign equals”.
To prepare negotiators, Lord Frost and his deputies organised what became known as “Star Chambers”, adversarial sessions where officials would be grilled and forced to defend British political positions through the prism of highly technical talks.
The often lively and rigorous discussions set a premium on people thinking on their feet and helped create “esprit de corps”.
But if the British side was preparing for a different kind of negotiation, Brussels felt no need to switch from its successful approach, which had led to Mr Johnson buckling to demands over the Irish backstop.
In the run-up to Greenwich minds had been focused by the former Irish prime minister Leo Varadkar who, standing alongside Mr Barnier in Dublin, set out the EU world view.
“The situation is that the EU is a union of 27 member states. The UK is only one country. And we have a population and a market of 450 million people,” he said on January 27, ringing alarm bells in Downing Street. “The UK, it’s about 60 million. So if these were two teams up against each other playing football, who do you think has the stronger team?”
This outlook, still a dominant one, saw British economic independence from the EU as a myth that failed to recognise the real politique of power between a regulatory superpower of 27 countries versus just one.
In this world view, one that informed Mr Barnier’s starting point, Britain would have no choice but to bow to the inevitable and accept the writ of Brussels, in the form of alignment with EU laws, as the price for “frictionless” trade.
Yet they were about to be disabused. A week after the Greenwich speech, Michael Gove, the Cabinet Office minister in charge of Brexit preparations, hosted a Whitehall event where he made clear that Britain could not care less about friction, even if it hurt the UK economy.
There would be checks on food and goods of animal origin, he accepted, plus customs declarations and mandatory safety and security certificates required for all imports.
This was a huge shift away from the previous government’s position of frictionless trade.
This penny had not dropped with the EU, however, and Mr Barnier’s draft negotiating mandate was essentially based on assumptions contained in the “political declaration of the future relationship”, almost entirely negotiated by Sir Olly.
The non-binding text, which had been sneered at by the EU as a declaratory wishlist, was now the foundation of Mr Barnier’s negotiating principles.
It took a highly unusual speech by Lord Frost, a former diplomat and now Mr Johnson’s political appointee as Brexit negotiator, to change the parameters of the debate.
Provocatively and symbolically he chose to make the speech in Brussels with a tutorial on how international agreements, particularly trade, can only be built around the assumption that both parties are sovereign powers.
“The EU needs to understand, I mean genuinely understand, not just say it, that countries geographically in Europe can, if they choose it, be independent countries,” he said.
“I recognise that some in Brussels might be uncomfortable with that, but the EU must, if it is to achieve what it wants in the world, find a way of relating to its neighbours as genuinely sovereign equals.”
If that was the public message, in private meetings the UK chief negotiator made clear to Mr Barnier that if there was any chance of a deal it could not be on the basis that small submits to big.
Lord Frost explained that for the UK, the Canada-style deal Mr Johnson wanted provided an example on two fronts.
It was a conventional free-trade deal, with added ambition. More importantly Canada, in its trade with the United States and despite its close geographical proximity, had not accepted that American regulations should determine its own standard of laws.
The idea that Canada would allow US courts a role on regulatory alignment, as the EU was asking for, would be laughed at.
To make their point the UK weaponised old EU slides used to put pressure on Mrs May three years before.
Downing Street tweeted a 2017 EU presentation showing that — with the UK’s demands for sovereignty, leaving the single market and customs union — the only option available was a Canada-style trade agreement.
Mr Barnier had flourished the slides at speeches, in meetings and photo opportunities all over Europe for a year while Mrs May’s government had pursued its approach of “frictionless” trade.
Accompanying the slide, the Downing Street press operation, under Lee Cain, noted that “in 2017 the EU showed on their own slide that a Canada-type FTA was the only available relationship for the UK”.
“Now they say it’s not on offer after all. Michel Barnier, what’s changed?,” the tweet said.
The EU was furious and Mr Barnier dismayed at the “weaponising” of his famous staircase slide against him, leading to accusations that the “attack from Downing Street was below the belt”.
“They went mental,” a senior British source said.
“After all the cakeism, they couldn’t believe that we were turning the tables on them. They couldn’t believe Frost was saying, ‘Canada? Yes please, give it to us, we’ll have thank you very much,’ ” the source added.
Just two weeks later, formal negotiations opened. Ahead of the talks in Brussels on March 3, Lord Frost gathered his teams and the staff at the UK mission to give them a pep talk. He told them to be polite and constructive but proud of what they were doing and assured them that a bad deal was worse than none at all, a far cry from the days of Sir Olly Robbins.
His words were quickly relayed back to Barnier a few hundred metres away in the commission’s Berlaymont headquarters creating a myth that Lord Frost did nothing to dispel, that he would walk out of talks if the EU was refusing to budge on Britain’s demands for a relationship of sovereign equals.
One civil servant present said that after the talk, everyone was “standing taller”. “You can spend hours in the rooms with beige walls and forget what it is all about,” he said. “Frost convinced us that we are part of something with national and historical importance. Something to be proud of.”
As talks began a few hours later, the EU side were taken aback when the UK team entered the commission’s building sporting patriotic lanyards for their passes and wearing Union Jack lapel badges.
But it was over before it had even properly begun.
The extraordinary speed at which coronavirus overwhelmed Europe relegated Brexit both from the public consciousness and, more importantly, from the pressing political issue it had been in February. There simply wasn’t the bandwidth to cope.
In London, where some of the most talented officials in Whitehall had been seconded to work on Brexit, they were redeployed to work on the pandemic.
The politicians were also forced to reprioritise.
Mr Johnson entrusted Mr Gove with leading the government’s virus response in the Cabinet Office, buying ventilators rather than worrying about custom checks at Calais.
Meetings of the government’s Brexit strategy and operations committees were indefinitely postponed.
The only question anyone worried about was whether the December 31 deadline was still viable.
Many thought it wasn’t. But Lord Frost’s argument to the prime minister was that while critics (and the EU) talked up the implausibility of doing a deal in such extraordinary circumstances, in reality time was not the problem.
Before Covid-19 struck the UK had already written a draft free-trade deal to illustrate its objectives, as had the EU.
Lord Frost made the point that it was not the drafting of a treaty that was the problem but the political trade-offs involved.
Those, the UK side believed, would only ever be made at the last minute so the suspension of early negotiation sessions would make little difference to the chance of getting an overall agreement.
Not only that, refusing to accept an extension to the transition agreement would prove to the EU that the government was serious.
Many on the European side agreed. “The politics and the difficulties of the politics were well known. What is the point of extending a deadline just to protract or avoid finding the compromises that everyone knew were necessary,” a senior European diplomatic source said.
In the end the talks were suspended for two months but in late April with cases on both sides of the Channel beginning to decline, it was decided to resume negotiations, albeit remotely.
Like the rest of the population getting used to working in lockdown, both teams suffered the distractions of the “through the Zoom keyhole” meetings and being entertained by the background glimpses into the homes of their European or British counterparts.
At the first online “plenary” with all the teams in the spring, it was the talking point of the day. “Everyone was suddenly looking at sitting rooms or studies. Everyone was texting each other saying ‘look at his books or what about that painting — yikes where did they get that?’. No one was really listening to what was being said,” one negotiator said.
By all accounts the talks went nowhere.
Despite the skirmishes in February the EU was still sticking to the script that Britain could not reproduce the frictionless trade of the single market and customs without compromising its sovereignty.
“They were asking for stringent level playing field commitments, including dynamic alignment with EU law and the ECJ,” a British source said.
“We kept saying ‘no way, how about we accept some tariffs, more like Canada. But it was not going anywhere’.”
In May, amid the impasse, Lord Frost made an unusual move by sending a public letter to Mr Barnier and publishing draft UK legal texts so that they would be seen by the EU’s 27 national governments.
His intervention — running to more than 1,500 words — was the refrain of the spring’s argument, that Britain did not want special access and should therefore be treated like any other country seeking a free-trade agreement.
“Your text contains novel and unbalanced proposals which would bind this country to EU law or standards,” he wrote.
“It amounts to saying that a country in Europe cannot expect to determine its own rules, simply on the grounds of geography, and that it must bend to EU norms. That is not an argument that can hope to be accepted in the 21st century,” he wrote.
Mr Barnier replied the following day with a certain hauteur to complain that Lord Frost had broken diplomatic negotiation etiquette by going public in such a combative way with their disagreements.
“I do not think that an exchange of letters regarding the substance of the negotiations is necessarily the best way to discuss,” he replied.
“In particular, I would not like the tone that you have taken to impact the mutual trust and constructive attitude that is essential between us.”