Soften your line for next Brexit talks, EU tells Barnier
‘A sort of mandate to do the deal’
THE EU is preparing to issue new instructions for negotiating Brexit, it emerged last night.
The conciliatory move will bolster Theresa May as she tries to sell her Chequers deal to the Tory party and calm a threatened Brexiteer rebellion.
The EU’s 27 remaining leaders are expected to discuss whether to issue additional guidance to Michel Barnier, the bloc’s chief negotiator, at an informal summit in Salzburg, Austria, later this month.
Ambassadors in Brussels are reported to have been briefed on the possibility that the EU could take a more conciliatory approach to the negotiations.
If approved, the update to Mr Barnier’s instructions would ‘serve as a sort of mandate to do the deal’, according to a senior EU diplomat quoted by the Financial Times. Brexit Secretary Dominic Raab has blamed a ‘dogmatic’ approach to negotiations for the limited progress made so far on a deal.
One EU diplomat described the possibility of new guidelines as a ‘save Theresa’ operation, according to the newspaper.
‘We aren’t expecting the EU to change Mr Barnier’s guidelines, but we hope the leaders will tell them to interpret them in such a way as to make a deal possible,’ a senior British official told the Financial Times.
It came as a former Brexit minister warned Mrs May risks a ‘catastrophic’ split at next month’s Tory conference if she persists with her Chequers plan.
Steve Baker, who resigned over the plan in July, said the Prime Minister would face a ‘massive problem’ unless she abandoned her flagship policy before the gathering of the party faithful in Birmingham.
He added there was still time for Mrs May to pursue a more conventional free trade deal that the party would support.
‘We are reaching the point now where it is extremely difficult to see how we can rescue the Conservative Party from a catastrophic split if the Chequers proposals are carried forward,’ he said.
‘I am gravely concerned for the future of our party… because I recognise that the Labour opposition represents a severe danger to our security and prosperity.’
Mrs May has ordered her chief of staff Gavin Barwell and communications director Robbie Gibb to sell the Chequers plan to backbench MPs at a series of dinners this week.
She will also convene a special meeting of the Cabinet on Thursday to coordinate contingency plans for the possibility of a nodeal Brexit.
Meanwhile, former Cabinet ministers David Davis and Owen Paterson will outline proposals designed to overcome the Irish border issue that has dogged the Brexit talks.
Eurosceptics will push ahead tomorrow with a major new study on the impact of a nodeal Brexit. The report by the Economists for Free Trade group dismisses ‘hysteria’ over predicted food shortages and says the UK economy would benefit from trading on World Trade Organisation terms.
Jacob ReesMogg, chairman of the European Research Group of Tory MPs, said: ‘We have nothing to fear from trading on WTO terms… Let Brexit mean Brexit and let us flourish under the auspices of the WTO.’
The document says UK exports to WTO countries have risen three times faster than those to the EU over the past 25 years.