BRITAIN will have no Brexit deal next March if Theresa May sticks to her Chequers Plan, Ireland’s EU commissioner Phil Hogan, has warned as he denounced the "silly behaviour" of Conservative politicians.
In a strongly-worded intervention, the Commissioner for Agriculture and Rural Development claimed that the Prime Minister’s red lines meant the only option available was a Canada-style trade deal.
In a speech in Ireland, he dismissed Brexiteers Boris Johnson, Jacob Rees-Mogg and Nigel Farage as the "Three Stooges" and suggested they did "not know the first thing” about the significance of the Irish border issue.
He claimed the UK was “trapped in a recurring cycle of silly behaviour" and “absurdist politics".
The Commissioner said the Chequers proposal to resolving the Irish border issue - by effectively keeping the whole UK in the single market for goods only - was unacceptable to the EU.
He added: "If the UK attitude is Chequers and only Chequers, there will be no agreement before March next year on the future trade relationship. We come back then to the withdrawal treaty pure and simple, part of which is the backstop arrangement for Ireland's border."
Labour’s Virendra Sharma, speaking on behalf of the anti-Brexit Best for Britain campaign, said: "Another day, another knife plunged into the heart of the Prime Minister's Chequers proposals. When will this Government give up on their unpopular plan?”
The start of next week marks 200 days before Brexit on March 29 2019.
The Prime Minister, who is spending the weekend on her annual trip to Balmoral for private talks with the Queen, is expected on Tuesday to chair a special session of the Cabinet focusing on no-deal preparations.
She and her senior colleagues remain insistent the Chequers Plan is the only game in town.
Philip Hammond was in Vienna yesterday telling his fellow EU finance ministers that it delivered both for the UK and the EU and “persuading them to persuade the European Commission to engage with us" – ie pressure Michel Barnier to compromise.
Noting how Brexit would happen just nine weeks before the European parliamentary elections, the Chancellor said: “It's not in anybody's interest to have a chaotic Brexit, a Brexit without a deal, so we will keep working very hard together and I'm sure we will get there."
Earlier, the transcript of the EU chief negotiator’s private meeting with MPs was released, which showed how Mr Barnier had made clear to them that key elements of the Chequers Plan were "not acceptable" to Brussels such as the proposals on customs arrangements as well as the suggestion that the UK and EU could have a free trade area with a common rulebook for goods but not services.
Yet, it also made clear that, unlike the suggestion from one of the MPs, Labour’s Stephen Kinnock, the chief negotiator did not tell members of the Commons Brexit Committee that the Chequers Plan was “dead”.
In the Commons on Wednesday, Mr Kinnock broke into French to tell Dominic Raab, the Brexit Secretary, that Mr Barnier had told them: "Les propositions sont mortes,"; the proposals are dead.
But when asked if the Chequers Plan was "dead in the water", the transcript showed the chief negotiator replied: "In the White Paper there are lots of positive things, lots of useful things, just to make that absolutely clear.
"I did not just reject the White Paper outright; that is just not true. I hope that you will understand that."
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