Read on Twitter
This points to a failure in the way that I and many others have tried to assess chances of no-deal this year. https://twitter.com/Mij_Europe/status/1334037291178860546
We've looked at broad incentives, rationally understood - ie Johnson under attack for competence and knows no-deal will be seen as incompetent. Or, on the other side, Johnson having to placate ERG headbangers.
But I think that falls apart on two levels. Firstly, it underplays the chaos of all political events - the personalities at the heart of them, making decisions often on instinct, or due to moments defined by chance.
Secondly, it overestimates the extent to which those individuals are rational, or respond to broader rational incentives rather than immediate ones.
Regardless of whether there's a deal or not, I think it was a mistake to look at this as part of that broader set of incentives.
The wibbly-wobbly one-way-this-moment-another-way-the-next quality of the talks, the impossibility of forming a coherent narrative out of them, suggests that this simply isn't about an agreed set of incentives operating on the relevant actors.
It's about a guy, or a small number of guys, who are really quite foolish, thinking really quite foolishly, on the basis of gut instinct and short-term incentives.
Which, of course, is worse.
The same of course goes double for all those who keep insisting that there will definitely be no-deal because they've planned it all along etc. Basically an extension of dead-cat-syndrome: seeing too much conspiracy everywhere.
The world is much more chaotic and unpredictable than we allow.
