Mr. John Callinan:

To park what has been spoken about, I mentioned the domestic Government policy focus on economic issues and how to deal with that earlier. On the negotiation process, the detailed negotiating directives that are currently being discussed are due to be finalised at the General Affairs Council next week. That would then be the ending of the first phase of documentation, capturing how the EU is going at the negotiation process. The working assumption had been that formal negotiations would then begin almost immediately, but the calling of the British election has effectively put that on hold from all sides for a few weeks. The hypothesis now is that, as soon as the British election is over and the line-up is clear on the other side, negotiations between the Barnier team and the British representatives will begin, and that what we would hope, as mentioned earlier, is that this moment of sufficient progress on the early issues would be reached reasonably earlier and that the discussions would then widen to include the framework for that future trading relationship, potentially before the end of the year.