EU leader: We’ll make Brexit painful for U.K.

LONDON — Since Britain voted to leave the European Union, U.K. officials have had one message: Brexit means Brexit.

Now they have EU leaders’ reply: And it’s going to hurt.

The prime minister of Malta, whose country is about to assume the EU presidency, is the latest leader to dash Britain’s hopes of an easy divorce, signaling that the 27 other nations will drive a hard bargain.

Joseph Muscat told the BBC that “there will not be a situation when the U.K. has a better deal than it has today.”

“In the U.K. it’s fair game to bash Brussels and then you don’t need to be surprised that in Brussels they bash you back,” Muscat said in an interview broadcast Friday. “So this is a bit of Catch-22. It won’t be a case whether one side gains and the other side loses. We are all going to lose something.”

Malta, a former British colony, is usually one of the U.K.’s strongest supporters in Europe. The island nation is due to hold the EU’s rotating presidency for six months from Jan. 1 — a period that could coincide with the start of U.K. exit negotiations.

British Prime Minister Theresa May says she will trigger Article 50 of the EU’s key treaty, beginning two years of exit talks, by March 31. She and her ministers have refused to set out in advance the type of deal Britain will seek, saying that would undermine their bargaining position.

Last week, Dutch Finance Minister Jeroen Dijsselbloem — who heads the group of 19 countries who use the common euro currency — accused British Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson of “saying things that are intellectually impossible, politically unavailable.”

In particular, he referred to suggestions by Johnson and others that Britain might be able to stay in the EU’s single market for goods and services while imposing limits on immigration from the bloc. Free movement of workers is a key EU principle, but many Britons who voted to leave the EU are insistent the U.K. take control of immigration.

Muscat dismissed the idea that Britain could have both single-market membership and movement restrictions.

“And I could in theory win the 100 meters Olympic race,” he said. “It’s just not happening.”

U.K. Brexit Secretary David Davis visited the European Parliament in Strasbourg this week to meet EU negotiators, and characterized the trip as a chance to get “to know each other and get to trust each other.”

But Manfred Weber, the German caucus leader of the parliament’s main conservative group, said he came out of the meeting thinking Britain had “no idea what Brexit really means.”