UK struggles for last-ditch Brexit deal

BRUSSELS/DUBLIN, October 16

Negotiators struggled on Wednesday to clinch an eleventh-hour Brexit deal on the eve of an EU summit, raising the chances that Prime Minister Boris Johnson will have to seek an extension of the October 31 deadline for Britain’s exit from the bloc.

Talks in Brussels on Tuesday between European Union and British officials ran into the night and resumed just hours later, but Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar said there were still “many issues” to be resolved.

Meanwhile, EU Council President Donald Tusk said the basic foundations of an agreement on Brexit were ready and that it could materialise within hours. “The basic foundations of an agreement are ready and theoretically tomorrow we could accept this deal with Great Britain," Tusk told Polish journalists in Brussels. "Theoretically, in seven or eight hours everything should be clear,” Tusk said via a live broadcast on Poland's TVN24 news channel.

“I had hoped that we would have received a ready, negotiated, legal text this morning so that member states could get to know it,” Tusk said, adding that “everything is going in a good direction.”

Johnson held talks with the DUP and pro-Brexit Conservatives on Tuesday and has been trying to find a way to soothe their concerns over any compromise he offers to the EU to try to secure a deal.

A central figure in the 2016 referendum who came to power as leader of the Conservative Party in July, Johnson has pledged to take Britain out of the EU on Oct. 31 with or without a deal. He is in a race against time to get a deal before Thursday's EU summit.

Britain’s Brexit minister Steve Barclay described the ongoing closed-door talks as "intensive" but confirmed his country would ask for another Brexit extension if there was no deal by Saturday. The main sticking point in the long-running talks with Brussels over Brexit, which has already been delayed twice, is the border between EU member Ireland and the British province of Northern Ireland. The question is how to prevent the frontier becoming a backdoor into the EU’s single market without erecting controls which could undermine the 1998 peace agreement that ended decades of conflict in the province.  — Agencies

Bored by Divorce saga? A Brexit-free news channel on offer

• After three years of Brexit crisis, Sky News is betting that some viewers are so bored by the divorce drama that there is a market for a channel dedicated to news that has nothing to do with Britain's exit from the European Union.
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