BRUSSELS TAUNTS MAY OVER ‘INSANE’ BREXIT PLAN

Brussels has taunted Theresa May over her ‘insane’ Brexit plan as she heads to Ireland on the latest leg of her struggle to get a deal. The Prime Minister met a wall of resistance from EU chiefs to her pleas for changes to the backstop in a brutal round of talks in the Belgian capital yesterday.

EU council president Donald Tusk stoked tensions by dismissing Mrs May’s objections to his jibe about Brexiteers deserving a ‘special place in Hell’.

He also praised a rival proposal from Jeremy Corbyn to lock the UK in a customs union - while commission chief Jean-claude Juncker insisted the Withdrawal Agreement will not be reopened.

Even though there was a small comfort as the bloc agreed to re-start discussions between technical teams on a solution, it now seems impossible for Mrs May to have a new package ready to bring back to the Commons before the end of February.

That would be barely a month before the UK is due to crash out - raising the stakes dramatically.

A senior EU official complained that Brexit was ‘still at square one’ and they had ‘lost the month of February’.

‘Mrs May is now flirting with nodeal and there’s a point where we’re going to enter full blown blame game mode,” the official told the Telegraph.

They claimed the PM was determined to run the negotiation “down to the wire”, describing the remaining timetable for striking and ratifying a deal as “insane”

Belgium, (Daily Mail), 8

February 2019