Michel Barnier warns UK can’t cope with coronavirus and no trade deal

Michel Barnier stoked up the Brexit threats today as he warned the UK cannot cope with coronavirus and no trade deal.

The EU negotiator accused Boris Johnson of reneging on promises as he warned there will not be an agreement unless the British side gives ground.

The vicious swipe came as the PM prepares to join talks for the first time this week, with the clock running down ahead of a summer deadline for deciding whether a settlement will be possible by the end of the year. 

There is a deadline of July 1 to seek an extension to the ‘standstill’ transition period, which will end on December 31 otherwise. But Mr Johnson is adamant there will be no delay, and his envoy David Frost has warned that the hard line from Brussels on issues such as access to fishing waters could prevent progress.

The UK has accused the EU of ‘running down the clock’ in the hopes that Mr Johnson will cave in to their demands. 

In an interview with the Sunday Times, Mr Barnier said the UK had more to lose from failure to get a trade deal than the EU, and the damage would be compounded by the impact of coronavirus.  

‘The UK has been taking a step back – two steps back, three steps back – from the original commitments,’ Mr Barnier said.

‘The UK negotiators need to be fully in line with what the Prime Minister signed-up to with us.

‘Because 27 heads of state and government and the European Parliament do not have a short memory.’

Mr Barnier said the EU’s heads of state remembered ‘very clearly the text which we negotiated with Boris Johnson’.

‘And we just want to see that complied with. To the letter… and if that doesn’t happen there will be no agreement,’ he said.

Mr Barnier insisted UK withdrawal from the EU was a ‘lose-lose’ for both sides and a question of ‘damage limitation’, saying no-one – not even Nigel Farage – had shown there was any ‘added value’ to the UK’s departure.

But he said the EU was ‘less exposed because 7 per cent of our exports go to the UK, whereas for the UK it’s 47 per cent of their exports which come to the EU’. 

Pointing to the coronavirus meltdown facing countries around the world, he said: ‘If we don’t get an agreement then that will have even more consequences. And then of course those will be added to the already very serious consequences of the coronavirus crisis..  

‘So, I think we have a joint responsibility in this very serious crisis, which affects so many families… with so many deaths, so many sick people, so many people unemployed… to do everything we can to reach an agreement and I very much hope that we will do so.’

A British source told the Mail on Sunday: ‘What is clear is that the conventional approach will not get us much further. The EU needs to inject some political reality into its approach and appreciate that they cannot use their usual tactic of delay to drag the talks into autumn.’