Did Angela Merkel really set Boris Johnson a 30-day Brexit deadline to fix the Irish border?

One widespread takeaway from Boris Johnson’s visit to Berlin this week was that he was given a 30-day deadline to come up with a replacement for the Irish backstop, apparently set by Angela Merkel.

But there’s been a bit of confusion about whether this was really the case. On Thursday Ms Merkel issued a clarification to her comments.

“I did not set 30-day deadline,” she said. “I said that what one can achieve in three or two years can also be achieved in 30 days. It is not about 30 days. The 30 days were meant as an example to highlight the fact that we need to achieve it in a short time.”

But it seems like she fooled her French counterpart: the day after Johnson’s Berlin meeting her ally Emmanuel Macron talked in terms of a 30-day deadline and said he doubted whether much could be achieved during that time.

So was this claim that there was no deadline a U-turn by the German chancellor? Probably not. Here’s what she said originally.

“We were confident we could find a solution in two years, but we could also find one in the next 30 days, why not?”

There wasn’t much else to it, and this looks relatively clear: it seems to be more of a suggestion or throwaway comment than a deadline. Then how did the apparent misunderstanding come about?

The reason for the reports was because Mr Johnson, speaking at the press conference after their meeting, seized on her comments and effectively laundered her words into a deadline.

“You have set a very blistering timetable of 30 days – if I understood you correctly, I am more than happy with that,” he said in response to her. He wasn’t corrected at the time by the German chancellor, and this led to reports that a 30-day deadline had been set by Ms Merkel.

So we’re probably better off assuming the EU won’t be getting the countdown clock out.

There is no particular significance to 30 days: the UK has more than 60 days before it crashes out of the EU at the end of October. There will however be a European Council summit in Brussels on 17-18 October – the last planned meeting of EU leaders before the exit date – and major preparations for the summit are usually completed a week or so before the meeting. If you squint, that’s about 30 days to get serious work done.