British and EU Brexit negotiators have renewed belief that the bloc’s leaders will be able to usher in an intense and decisive “tunnel” negotiation for the last weeks of October when they meet at a summit in Brussels on Thursday. A meeting between the UK’s chief negotiator, David Frost, and his EU counterpart, Michel Barnier, in London on Friday morning was said by diplomatic sources to have been positive, with the negotiating teams now due to reengage on Monday. “There is media reports of the summit being a stocktake – there should be more ambition than that,” said one EU source. The prime minister has publicly suggested that the EU summit in Brussels is his deadline for a deal. He said in September that without agreement it would be time to “accept and move on”. The UK’s chief negotiator, David Frost, reiterated the comments during a parliamentary hearing this week, but a senior EU diplomat said this was not Brussels’ understanding following private discussions. “I don’t detect any readiness on the British side to suspend the negotiations,” the source said. “This is going to continue. It is not a deadline.”
Downing Street’s repeated public threats reflect the hope that the summit will be a springboard to a period of so-called “tunnel” negotiations in which the two teams negotiate without consulting outside political stakeholders or briefing the media on possible compromises. The talks are expected to go right up to Thursday afternoon when the 27 heads of state and government sit down. “We need to get a little bit more from the UK side, or Michel Barnier needs to, before he is ready to use, as he says, the ‘submarine’ or the ‘tunnel’,” a senior EU diplomat said. In an analysis that the EU side does not share, Frost had suggested this week that significant progress was being made on the issue of state aid, and that fisheries were the biggest stumbling block to an agreement that could be in place by the end of the transition period at the end of December. Downing Street is pushing for a radical change in the share of catches in British waters, but the EU has so far insisted it will not accept anything less than the status quo. Eight member states – Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Ireland, the Netherlands, Spain and Sweden – have a particular interest and are yet to offer Barnier any flexibility. Barnier has privately said that the key will be how the French president, Emmanuel Macron, reacts in the coming weeks to Downing Street’s increasingly forthright rhetoric about the need for the EU to budge on its position or risk scuppering a deal.
“What I see now is that the UK is, you know, trying to say ‘OK you know this is really valuable’. But they see it as a lever to gain market access to the European Union, I think that’s the game that we’re seeing right now,” said a senior diplomat. “For France, this is something they look at, and maybe it’s even going to be the number one issue in the EU UK negotiating talks [for France].” Barnier has informed the 27 member states that Brexit will necessarily mean a reduced level of catches for them in British waters in an attempt to persuade the bloc to present a more realistic negotiating position. The loss of any revenues currently earned by the EU’s fishing fleet in British waters would be relatively small compared with the wider trade deal, but it risks creating internal division as those who lose out seek to be compensated with extra catches elsewhere in European waters. “It’s an issue that is of concern to eight member states, and for at least five or so of them it is a quite big political issue,” said a senior diplomat. “I mean, even if we’re talking about an annual volume over €650m [£590m], in fact it’s not that much, but politically it is.”