We should not have been surprised by the delays – in Brussels, nothing important ever gets decided until the last minute

In more than 15 years of attending Brussels summits, I have repeatedly seen schedules torn up and leaders emerging from talks, bleary-eyed, in the early hours, writes Andrew Woodcock

Ursula von der Leyen has been negotiating with Boris Johnson for what seems like an eternity (AP)

Lou Reed was talking about junkies and their dealers in 1970s New York, but he could just have easily been thinking about journalists covering the Brexit negotiations when he sang: “First thing you learn is that you’ve always got to wait.”

In more than 15 years of attending Brussels summits, I’ve become used to the fact that nothing important gets decided until the last minute – and there are no limits to how long that last minute can be delayed.

Time after time, schedules have been torn up and leaders have squabbled through the night before emerging, bleary-eyed in the early hours, for hurried press conferences to announce whatever deal they have managed to strike.

The massed ranks of reporters and 24-hour news channels are left for an indeterminate number of hours trying to eke out stories from the tiny fragments of information filtering out of the inner sanctum.

Gossip flies around the massive press room in the atrium of Brussels’ Justus Lipsius building and surrounding bars over possible concessions and supposed breakthroughs. As time wears on, interest shifts to clues of when it may all end, with forensic analysis of the movement of officials in and out of the room and the delivery of food to hungry negotiators.

Famously, when David Cameron secured his doomed renegotiation of the UK’s membership in 2016, the deal was due to be sealed at an “English breakfast”, which gradually became brunch, then lunch, then dinner, as the day dragged on. It was finally announced in the early hours of the following morning.

Ironically, this means that far more journalistic time and effort is expended on trying to read the runes of stray comments and dubious briefings, garnered while negotiations are ongoing, than on reporting the actual result of the talks, which has to be digested and written up by exhausted hacks in a matter of minutes.

With negotiations on Brexit and the EU trade deal, all of this has been magnified to ridiculous proportions. Over four-and-a-half years, I’ve lost count of the number of unbreachable deadlines that have drifted by unmet, to the ever-growing horror of businesses, which need lead time to adapt to any new trading arrangements.

Even when a text seemed to be finalised on Wednesday, haggling continued through the night on the treatment of different species of fish, as supposed times for a press conference slipped from late afternoon to evening to dawn on Thursday and then later and later on Christmas Eve.

In a way, last-minute decisions are built into the very process of striking a deal. Why would negotiators call time when it is possible that the other side might make a concession if forced to wait a little longer? Often, the impression at EU summits has been that leaders only agree anything serious when they are so tired that the lure of their beds comes to seem more important.

It may be that we have a deal now only because of some clever wording in last year’s withdrawal agreement, designed to bring an end to the interminable delays. The agreement offered an extension to talks of up to two years beyond the end of 2020, but said that any extension must be requested by June. Because the withdrawal agreement has the status of a treaty in EU law, that was a deadline that could not be fudged, short of drawing up a new treaty to overrule it.

So once June had passed, an extension was no longer possible and the UK was forced to transition to its post-Brexit future at 11pm on 31 December, at which point at last the waiting will be over.

Yours,

Andrew Woodcock

Political editor