All May wants for Christmas is EU

UK Prime Minister Theresa May emerged from the EU summit on Friday without any concessions on the Irish backstop and faced a bleak Christmas trying to find a way out of her Brexit malaise.

After pledging to extract legal and political assurances on the backstop, May instead found her proposal blocked by some EU member states and the debate in Britain described as “nebulous” by European Commission president Jean-Clause Juncker.

Video footage at the summit showed an irritated May remonstrating with Juncker over his remarks, although he claimed they were about Britain and not the prime minister personally.

"She thought that I did criticise her by saying yesterday night that the British position was nebulous... I did not refer to her but to the overall state of the debate in Britain," he said.

EU leaders had plenty of sympathy to offer May, but little in the way of tangible movement that would give her something to unite a fractious Conservative Party and drive her plan through parliament.

European council president Donald Tusk repeated there could be no renegotiation and took aim at the extreme hard Brexiteers in her party that tried to depose her in a no confidence vote on Wednesday.

“We have treated Prime Minister May with the greatest respect, all of us, and we really appreciate the efforts by the prime minister to ratify our common agreement,” Tusk said at the end of the summit.

“My impression is that in fact we have treated prime minister May with a much greater empathy and respect than some MPs, for sure.”

However, he reminded the UK that he had “no mandate to organise any further negotiations”.

“We have to exclude any kind of reopening our negotiations on the withdrawal agreement. But of course we will stay here in Brussels, and I am always at Prime Minister Theresa May’s disposal.”

Germany's Angela Merkel also refused to offer any hope or concessions for May.

“The 27 member states have given assurances. They are contained in the conclusions of yesterday evening,” she told reporters. “So that is our position, that is what we have put on the table and now we expect Great Britain to respond.”

May had arrived at the meeting hoping to win changes on the contentious backstop -- designed to stop a hard border with Ireland in the event of no free trade deal with the EU -- and bring back a deal she get could get through a divided parliament.

However the proposal to prevent Britain being caught in the backstop indefinitely were opposed by Ireland, France, Sweden, Spain and Belgium.

Having survived a no confidence vote on Thursday which she secured by pledging to step down before the 2022 election, May had pledged to push hard for changes, but her personal presentation before the other 27 leaders before dinner proved hard to digest.

Overnight Juncker called on the UK to be clear on what it wanted from the EU.

"Our UK friends need to say what they want, instead of asking us to say what we want and so we would like within a few weeks our UK friends to set out their expectations for us, because this debate is sometimes nebulous and imprecise and I would like clarifications," he said after the summit.

“We don’t want the UK to think there can be any form of renegotiation, that is crystal clear. We can add clarifications but no real changes. There will be no legally binding obligations imposed on the withdrawal treaty.”