"Why,” asks Harry the gangster’s dimwit of a missus in tragicomedic crime caper In Bruges, “Would anyone have to go to Belgium?” “To sort something out,” hisses Harry, adding with menace: “It’s a matter of honour.” So indeed it is for the EU’s leading member states, sharpening their own weapons for a European Council meeting this week, intended to resolve the interlocking headaches of the Brexit deadline and internal EU strife.

The agenda is so full of gremlins that it is dubbed by one senior official a “feast with guaranteed indigestion”. This is not helped by the geopolitical turmoil over the fallout from a chaotic US retreat from Syria, which also exposes the fragmentary nature of Europe’s response to events in Turkey and a widening rift over how to handle Russia.

But the first indigestible item on the menu is the October 31 Brexit deadline, now the subject of a wrangle inside the EU about how best to handle the narrow window of deal opportunity opened up by the sudden warming of relations between Boris Johnson and Irish PM Leo Varadkar last week.

No 10’s latest offer to break the deadlock — a customs partnership for Northern Ireland to smooth some of the rough edges of the original offer — is welcomed by Emmanuel Macron. His support is vital, as the figure who has most carefully heeded Varadkar’s concerns and thoughts on how to manage a productive fudge on customs and tariff arrangements.

Others, including Michel Barnier, the EU’s chief negotiator, are more reluctant to “skip steps” — as one close aide puts it — “storing up problems down the line” which will come back to the EU to-do list. So hopes that a deal could be expedited have abated and No 10 must provide more detail on cross-border Irish trade arrangements — precisely the kind of detail Team Boris hoped could be left to the morning after the Brexit-date after-party.

A deal requires the EU to be teeth-​grittingly happy enough with it to push forwards to avoid the juddering halt of a no-deal outcome. The majority view among leaders, as expressed last night by Finnish Prime Minister Antti Rinne (who holds the revolving EU presidency), now favours taking longer than this week to do so, possibly with a pragmatic extension of uncertain length.

That plays into the hands of Remain proponents at Westminster, and those in the EU, who would like to try another heave in Parliament for a majority to back a second referendum before an election. Taken together, it increases domestic political pressure on Johnson to live up to the “do or die” promise.

Slot in the other two essential but tricky elements — maintaining both Irish and DUP support, and trying to woo Labour Brexit moderates to back Johnson (there was a decidedly warmer tone to the benches opposite in his Queen’s Speech yesterday) — and it all might add up, with legal agreements and trailing wires to be tidied afterwards.

On the more reassuring side, it looks as if there is a serious combined will to avoid no deal, and it’s noticeable that Johnson has dialled down his braggadocio. One diplomat helping “clear the piste of moguls” before Thursday mutters: “The last thing Berlin or Paris want to hear is any more threats.”

In Brussels terms, however bullish the Queen’s Speech projection of an independent, high-energy, low-tax, best-place-in-the-world Britain, Johnson is still the “demandeur” — an applicant who will probably be given an uncomfortable choice to accept a delay to Brexit or change its terms. The diplomat’s interjection was telling in a week when EU leaders are trying to cope with the delayed start to the new European Commission (probably to December), after the unsuccessful nomination of three candidates for commissioner.

This — rather than her testy phone call with Johnson last week — was the background to Angela Merkel’s sideswipe describing Britain post-Brexit as “a new competitor on our hands, alongside China and the US”. The implication being that Britain will be outside the EU at some point soon and this will bring some form of competitive arbitrage, which will need to be offset by a more unified European economic and fiscal outlook. Quite how this is to come about tends to be left vague in late-phase Merkelism.

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Give way tonight or face delay, Barnier warns Johnson

The immediate target of the German Chancellor’s frustration looks likely to be the European Parliament’s blocking of the three Commission candidates — most significantly Sylvie Goulard, France’s pick for the post of commissioner for the internal market. MEPs rejected Goulard, a protégé of President Macron, after allegations over financial entanglements with a think tank, and using a European parliamentary assistant for her domestic political work.

Verbal sniping between Paris and Berlin has broken out over the contretemps. Happily, the agreed outcome seems to be to move on after chiding Ursula von der Leyen, president-elect of the Commission, for a failure of political stagecraft. One thing that will not come as a surprise to former Cabinet colleagues of von der Leyen is the charge that she lacks focus on detail or the ability to dissolve tensions.

Like many EU spats, all this will be papered over by a public show of solidarity between Macron and Merkel, at a meeting tomorrow in Toulouse focused on boosting industrial co-operation, with a visit to Airbus. The French President has been musing that the continent “cannot afford the luxury of vengeance or small disputes” as it grapples with an unstable global mood and economic disruption.

The unspoken postscript is that when the British PM shows up for his date with destiny on Thursday, the two main power brokers of European politics will already have decided how far to help deliver “Boris Brexit” or hinder it.

Anne McElvoy is Senior Editor at The Economist