Theresa May came closer than ever on Monday to the Brexit deal she's been working on for months. A last-minute upset over the Irish border left all parties embarrassed and doesn't bode well for a second run at a breakthrough.
Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar said a solution to an intractable problem — what to do with the shared border with Northern Ireland when the U.K. leaves — had been agreed in the morning and unraveled while May was at a lunch with European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker in Brussels.
The meal that should have been the clincher was interrupted by a phone call between May and Arlene Foster — the leader of the Democratic Unionist Party, which opposes the EU's plans for the island after Brexit and props up May's government in London. For the DUP, any proposal that would apply to Northern Ireland and not the rest of the U.K. was going to be a problem.