PM to cut short holiday for Macron meeting

May flying to south of France to win support for Chequers deal as Hunt tells EU that UK ‘will not blink’

Christopher Hope, Peter Foster

Jack Maidment

THERESA MAY is to cut short her Italian walking holiday to hold Brexit talks with Emmanuel Macron in the south of France this week.

The move is part of a coordinated bid to win France’s support for the Prime Minister’s Chequers deal. Jeremy Hunt, the Foreign Secretary, held talks with his French counterpart in Paris yesterday. France’s support for Mrs May’s deal hammered out with her Cabinet at Chequers is considered “the toughest nut to crack” by Mrs May’s diplomats in persuading the EU to start making concessions in the talks.

The Prime Minister will end her holiday at Lake Garda early on Friday evening and fly to Mr Macron’s holiday home near Toulon on the French Riviera, returning to the UK on Saturday.

Mrs May’s team have been trying to arrange the meeting with Mr Macron since the Chequers blueprint – which prompted the resignations of Boris Johnson and David Davis from the Cabinet – was published last month.

Senior party figures have supported the Chequers deal, but some have warned it should be a line in the sand rather than a flexible starting point for negotiations, because of the concessions it makes to the EU.

A No10 source said the pair would use the meeting to have their first substantive face-to-face discussions about Mrs May’s Chequers deal.

The source said: “We need to crack on [in the talks]. France and Germany have always been important in the Brexit negotiations.”

News of the meeting emerged as Mr Hunt held talks about the deal with Jean-yves Le Drian, the French foreign minister, in Paris, and warned that the likelihood of a no-deal Brexit was “increasing by the day”.

Michel Barnier, the EU’S chief Brexit negotiator, has already savaged Mrs May’s blueprint, but Mr Hunt said it was a “profound misunderstanding” to think the UK would bow to Brussels.

Mr Hunt said Britain would not “blink” during negotiations and the EU would need to show a willingness to engage with Mrs May’s Chequers plan.

He said: “The probability of no deal is increasing by the day until we see a change of approach from the European Commission, who have this view that they just need to wait and Britain will blink. That is just a profound misunderstanding of us as a nation.”

The Treasury also confirmed yesterday that Britain gave an additional £700 million to the EU in 2017-18 – £8.8billion rather than £8.1billion in the previous year – in large part because of the devaluation in sterling after the Brexit referendum.

France has consistently been the leading EU voice calling for a tough approach on Brexit, according to EU diplomatic sources and accounts of meetings of the Task Force 50 working group seen by The Daily Telegraph.

Earlier this year, France strongly backed a European Commission move to block the UK from sensitive parts of the Galileo satellite programme, and it has been clear that it wants to use Brexit to force financial services to relocate from the City of London.

There have been early signs that some other EU countries are prepared to engage with the UK offer if Mrs May makes further concession on customs, but UK sources said that the French remained the “toughest nut to crack”.

One UK official told The Telegraph: “At least with the French, you know what their game is with Brexit. It’s to make a quick buck.”

UK negotiators and ministers are now focused on laying the groundwork for an informal summit of EU leaders in Salzburg on Sept 20.

‘We need to crack on [in the talks]. France and Germany have always been important in the Brexit negotiations’