Boris Johnson will travel to what EU officials described as a “neutral location” in Luxembourg on Monday to meetJean-Claude Junckerfor the first time in an attempt to break the Brexit impasse.
The talks will take place at a lunch hosted by Juncker in the European commission president’s home country, where he was prime minister for 18 Years.
Johnson will then hold talks with the current prime minister ofLuxembourg, Xavier Bettel.
EU sources suggested Johnson had sought to avoid a meeting in Brussels for fear of giving the impression that he was begging for concessions. A European commission spokeswoman said Juncker would meet him for a “working lunch”.
She said the location had been chosen by “common accord” and that it would allow Juncker the benefit of going straight from the talks to Strasbourg, where the European parliament is sitting next week. She declined to disclose details about the precise location of the meeting. “It is taking place at a neutral location, which [we] will not disclose”, she said. “It is a working lunch so you can imagine it is somewhere serving food.”
Johnson’s communications team is understood to believe that Theresa May undermined herself in the public eye by making dashes to Brussels to seek movement in the negotiation.
The prime minister has hinted at plans for further meetings with EU leaders next week.
His first visits in August , to Berlin and Paris to meet the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, and the French president, Emmanuel Macron, were widely seen as a success.
The British government version of Brexit involves the UK ultimately leaving the single market and customs union, requiring the return of a range of checks on goods crossing the border betweenNorthern Irelandand the Republic of Ireland. The “backstop” is intended as a standstill placeholder to ensure such checks do not have to be imposed between Brexit happening with a deal, and the start of a new free trade agreement yet to be negotiated between the UK and the EU.
Theresa May’s withdrawal agreement proposed keeping the whole of the UK in a shared customs territory with the EU during this period. An alternative idea involves only Northern Ireland staying in the EU’s customs territory. That would place a customs border in the Irish Sea. May described it as a threat to the constitutional integrity of the UK, but the new prime minister,Boris Johnson, has opened the current talks by proposing an all-Ireland agri-food zone. The suggestion is that he will seek to quietly build on that with further NI-only arrangements.
Given an NI-only backstop was an EU proposal in the first place, the U-turn would be warmly welcomed in Brussels, although attempts to give the Northern Ireland assembly a veto on its continuation would not be acceptable, and the DUP would be unlikely to support the prime minister in such a move in parliament.
If there is a no -DealBrexit, then there is no backstop.
Both EU leaders were said to have felt that Johnson was someone with whom they could do business, according to diplomatic cables seen by the Guardian.
But with the EU’s chief negotiator, Michel Barnier, lamenting as recently as Thursday that theUK had failed to put any concrete proposalsin writing to replace the Irish backstop, that optimism has markedly receded.
“We will see in the coming weeks if the British are able to make concrete proposals in writing that are legally operational, ”Barnier told senior MEPs. “While we have previously reached an agreement, as far as we can speak, we have no reason to be optimistic… I cannot tell you objectively whether contacts with the government of Mr Johnson will be able to reach an agreement by mid-October.”
Asked on Friday whether there had been progress in the recent talks, the European commission spokeswoman said: “Talks have resumed today and are ongoing as we speak.”
Johnson’s EU envoy, David Frost, is leading technical talks in Brussels on where the UK is seeking changes, but EU diplomats have accused him of offering only “aspirational” ideas so far.
Juncker accused the British earlier this week of being “part-time Europeans” since joining the European Economic Community in 1973.
“The British were told for more than 40 years that they were in, but they didn’t want to share all the policies that have been decided, ”he said. “The British since the very beginning were part-time Europeans. What we need are full-time Europeans. ”
Asked whether he believed there was “a special place in hell for those who promoted Brexit”, as the European council president, Donald Tusk, had said earlier this year, Juncker told the Euronews channel he did not believe in hell.
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