LONDON: British Prime Minister Boris Johnson played down hopes on Sunday of a breakthrough in his last-ditch bid to strike an amicable divorce deal with the European Union.

Negotiators went behind closed doors for intensive talks in Brussels after Johnson outlined a new set of proposals to Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar on Thursday.

They have very little time left to succeed.

EU leaders will meet on Thursday and Friday for a summit held under the pressures of the October 31 Brexit deadline just two weeks away.

The 27 would ideally like to have a full proposal to vote on by then.

But the sides are trying to achieve in a few days what they had failed to in the more than three years since Britons first voted to leave the European Union after nearly 50 years.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel will discuss the available options with French President Emmanuel Macron late on Sunday.

European officials said the bloc’s Brexit negotiator Michel Barnier will also brief EU ambassadors on the state of play on Sunday evening.

Downing Street said Johnson told his cabinet to brace for a cliff-hanger finish in the coming days.

Johnson reiterated “that a pathway to a deal could be seen but that there is still a significant amount of work to get there and we must remain prepared to leave on October 31,” a Downing Street spokesman said.

Outgoing EU chief Jean-Claude Juncker said British politics were getting more difficult to decipher than the riddle of an “Egyptian sphinx”.

“If the British ask for more time, which they probably will not, it would in my view be a historical nonsense to refuse them,” Juncker told Austria’s Kurier newspaper.

Johnson rose to power in July on a promise not to extend Brexit for a third time -- even for a few weeks.

Breaking that pledge could come back to haunt him in an early general election that most predict for the coming months.

Johnson is under parliamentary orders to seek a extension until January 31 of next year if no deal emerges by Saturday.

He has promised to both follow the law and get Britain out by October 31 — a contradiction that might end up being settled in court.

Ireland’s Varadkar hinted on Thursday that he could support the talks running on up to the October 31 deadline if a deal seemed within reach.

The few details that have leaked out suggest a compromise around the contentious Irish border issue Britain’s Northern Ireland partially aligned with EU customs rules.

Published in Dawn, October 14th, 2019