No Deal plans restart amid fears over trade talks deadline

MINISTERS have quietly restarted No Deal planning meetings amid fears trade talks with Brussels will collapse, The Mail on Sunday can reveal.

Whitehall’s EU Exit Operations committee – dubbed XO and chaired by Michael Gove – met on Thursday to begin preparations for a ‘disorderly December’, should Brussels ‘fail to grasp we really are going at the end of the year’, said a Cabinet Minister who was present.

Our revelation comes after Dominic Cummings warned that Brussels has not yet ‘woken up’ to Britain’s negotiating position – and would not for several weeks yet.

The top No10 aide told Government advisers at a meeting on Friday evening: ‘We are not bluffing on the no extension.’

The UK Government has insisted that the EU transition phase will end on December 31, but last week Ireland’s EU Commissioner Phil Hogan said that time frame was impossible.

Fears are mounting that Brussels’s intransigence and insistence on a settlement of fishing access rights before proper trade talks begin will push the negotiations to collapse.

In that scenario, the transition phase would end without new border rules in place – hence the Government’s reactivation of emergency planning.

Referring to the Conservatives’ resounding General Election win, Mr Cummings added that Europe would be wrong to think ‘a big majority means a softening of our position’.

And he warned that Brussels has ‘failed to grasp their judges will have no power and we are not interested in level playing fields’.

Mr Cummings’s warnings were echoed yesterday by Sajid Javid, who offered business a stark reality check on what Brexit means.

The Chancellor told the Financial Times: ‘There will not be alignment, we will not be a rule-taker, we will not be in the single market and we will not be in the customs union and we will do this by the end of the year.’

He added: ‘We’re ... talking about companies that have known since 2016 that we are leaving the EU.’

Previously Ministers had only privately conceded that there will be ‘friction’ at Dover and Calais as Britain is no longer seeking a close relationship with the EU.

Official trade talks with Brussels cannot start until next month – after Britain has formally left the bloc – with chief negotiator David Frost currently preparing the Government’s formal ‘red lines’.

In a bid to ratchet up pressure on Brussels, Downing Street will begin trade deal talks with the United States at the same time as negotiations get under way with the EU.

The Prime Minister has also tasked trade negotiators to start discussions with countries including Japan and Australia, alongside those with the US.