BRUSSELS: Weary EU officials prepared for another round of urgent Brexit negotiations Tuesday, with time running out and some European capitals beginning to doubt that London even wants a trade deal.
“But please, dear friends in London: Stop the games. Time is running out,” Germany’s European affairs minister Michael Roth warned as he met colleagues in Brussels ahead of a summit of EU leaders on Thursday.
Brussels’ chief negotiator Michel Barnier will be in London on Wednesday for informal talks with his UK opposite number David Frost on slow-moving efforts to agree a trade deal — full negotiations resume next week.
EU Commission vice-president Maros Sefcovic will meet his British counterpart Michel Gove in Brussels on Monday, just ahead of Brussels’ end-of-the-month deadline for London to drop a bill designed to rewrite the deal.
Prime Minister Boris Johnson has said that he is ready to walk away from the trade talks if there’s no progress by mid-October, and Brussels argues a deal must be done by then if it is to be implemented this year.
But — after Johnson launched British legislation to overwrite parts of the withdrawal treaty in open defiance of international law — some EU capitals think he is trying to sabotage the talks.
Irish Foreign Minister Simon Coveney, whose country has more to lose than most if talks break down, said the mood at the foreign ministers’ meeting was pessimistic. “What has been concerning over the last couple of days for me,” he said, “from speaking to other EU foreign ministers, is that there’s a growing sense that perhaps the UK doesn’t want to deal.
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