by Richard A » Mon Apr 06, 2020 12:46 pm
A lot will depend on what's happened to Dominic Cummings. He was reported to have tested positive for coronavirus around the same time BoJo and Hancock did, but I haven't heard much since. If he's still a force to be reckoned with, Javid has little chance - to resign rather than sack the staff Cummings didn't like was straight disrespectful. (On the other hand, if Javid does become PM, Cummings really is screwed.) So Raab will definitely be a contender, but so will Gove. Lord preserve us from an Andrea Leadsom comeback - that thought is too horrible to contemplate!
But there's a separate issue - the first part of this thread's title. Coronavirus has put absolutely all other business on the backburner, where it will stay for some months to come yet. On both sides of the Channel. So realistically, there won't be any serious discussions about the future EU-UK deal until at least midsummer, more likely September. Which doesn't give a lot of time before New Year's Eve. So, assuming a sufficient number of us are still alive come the autumn (which currently seems more likely than not), a no deal exit or an extension to trade talks? Depends, I suspect, on how the discussions among the Member States go. If I were a representative of the Spanish or Italian government, I would want to be flexible because my country's economy had just taken a thorough kicking and carrying on selling the Brits wine, beer (yes, we import a lot of Estrella Damm and Peroni) and fruit would help restart it, as would a return of British hordes to Lanzarote, Ibiza, Florence and Rome. Central Europe, hard to say - we used to import a lot of Polish goods but that was principally for the Polish community that increasingly we don't have any more. On the other hand, we'd already worked out that we need Central European farmworkers, so maybe some of them will want to come back. I guess we'll see.