Brexit is back – and Covid has transformed negotiations

We will know in the next few weeks if Britain is to leave the European Union without a trade deal. The ‘high-level’ meeting in June has been earmarked by the UK and the EU as the moment when they decide whether to take the negotiations to the next stage or not. If there is to be a deal, then the contours of it will need to start to become clearer at this meeting. If they don’t, then both sides will need to decide whether their time would be better spent preparing for trading on WTO terms than in unconstructive negotiations.

The Covid pandemic, far from pausing the talks, has made it all the more urgent that an agreement is found quickly. The UK and the EU will spend next year reshaping their economies and it makes sense to do that knowing what their trading arrangements will be in the medium term.

This is why the letter sent by David Frost, Boris Johnson’s chief Brexit negotiator, to his opposite number, Michel Barnier, is so significant. It makes it clear that the two sides are still nowhere near agreement. The British want a free trade deal like Canada’s, so won’t sign up to follow EU rules. The central plank of Frost’s position is that the whole point of Brexit is to ‘take back control’. Impossible, replies the EU: Canada is thousands of miles away. The UK is too intertwined with the EU economy to be offered the same terms. If neither side budges, there will be no trade deal.

Before the pandemic, the EU and the UK negotiators had been meeting alternately in Brussels and London. Since coronavirus, Frost and Barnier’s teams have had to continue the discussions by video-link. The negotiations have been bedevilled by the usual problems with video conferences: the two sides have talked over each other and become frustrated that one can’t understand what the other is saying.