May sees slipping of Brexit deal deadline
LONDON: UK Prime Minister Theresa May is resisting the European Union’s (EU) timetable for Brexit talks and is calculating that US President Donald Trump might help her.
While EU officials are signaling they want September to be a showdown moment in negotiations, the
UK is aiming for a later deadline, according to a person familiar with the situation. Ms May’s team thinks that by the end of November the
EU will be so preoccupied with the prospect of Mr Trump disrupting a Group of 20 summit that they will want to get the Brexit deal wrapped up, the person said.
The calculation, based on conversations with EU officials, is that leaders such as Germany’s Angela Merkel and Emmanuel Macron of France will want to present a united European front in support of the rules-based system — with Ms May onside — when they meet Mr Trump at the summit on Nov 30, the person said.
The British approach is at odds with the plan emerging from Europe. The UK is due to leave the EU on March 29 and both sides have said they are aiming for a deal in October.
Negotiators need to leave enough time for the UK and European parliaments to debate and ratify the final terms of the divorce.
In recent weeks, European officials have said they want progress even sooner as an informal summit of leaders on Sept 20 is now set to become a showdown Brexit meeting. EU officials have turned a summit scheduled for Oct 18-19, which was expected to be about Brexit, into an opportunity to plot an international response to Mr Trump’s tariff offensive.
With progress in the negotiations painfully slow, politicians in both the UK and the EU have begun warning that the chances of failure — with Britain crashing out of the bloc with no deal — have started to increase.
Talks are stuck on the sensitive issue of how to keep the Irish border free of checkpoints and police after Brexit, when it will become the EU’s frontier with the UK.
The EU has joined China and Japan in clashes with Trump over his decisions to impose tariffs on imports from his country’s biggest trading partners, and to withdraw from the Paris Climate Accord.