THE latest European Council summit of presidents and prime ministers finished at the weekend with the United Kingdom little closer to a Brexit breakthrough. While all sides now expect significant progress to come before the next EU council meeting in December, the fact is that the negotiations are badly behind schedule in what is already a very tight timetable to exit in March 2019.

As this latest meeting showed, British Prime Minister Theresa May's attempts at taking big steps forward continue to be hamstrung by a lack of any clear, coherent or credible UK government strategy for exiting the EU. If strategy is a balanced combination of ends, ways and means, then the United Kingdom under her leadership has from the start been unclear about what end it wants from Brexit. Ministers have been unsure of whether they have or can put in place the ways and means to get there and, to compound the problem, struggled to understand how the EU is thinking and behaving.

It has left Britain badly divided and heading towards a potentially hard, disorderly Brexit that would see no trade deal agreed between the parties. This could see an unprecedented breakdown in relations with its close neighbours, trading partners and allies.