A suggestion by one of the EU’s most powerful officials of possible further legal assurances on the Irish backstop has failed to win over Brexiter MPs, leading to heightened talk of the UK leaving the bloc with no deal.
After a meeting with Martin Selmayr yesterday, the cross-party Brexit select committee emerged clear that the European commission secretary general had floated the possibility of a legally binding adjunct to the withdrawal agreement.
However, Selmayr, a trusted aide of the commission president, Jean-Claude Juncker, tweeted that after the 90-minute discussions in Brussels he was convinced “the EU did well to start its no-deal preparations in December 2017”.
The committee’s chairman, Hilary Benn, said he had left with “the impression that (the EU) might be prepared to consider some additional statement or legal protocol” to sweeten the 585-page draft treaty.
The Labour MP Stephen Kinnock said Brussels appeared open to converting into legal text a letter of assurance published by Juncker and his European council counterpart, Donald Tusk, before the last Commons vote. That letter had offered swift trade negotiations and a rapid search for technological solutions to the Irish border issue to ensure the backstop would be temporarily, if ever, enforced.
“The Juncker and Tusk letter would in essence be copied and pasted into a protocol and shoved into the withdrawal agreement,” Kinnock said. “It is definitely (a case of ) reopening to quickly slip something in and close it very quickly. I would term it unzipping.”
Stephen Crabb, a Conservative former work and pensions secretary, said: “We talked around the idea of the Tusk letter being written into some sort of legal protocol but every time someone asked him if it is something he could do, he said: ‘First of all, it’s not me negotiating, and secondly, let me turn around the question: if we were to do that would you be guaranteed to vote for the deal?’
“That’s where some of the more Brexiteer members of the committee wouldn’t say.”
Crabb added: “I’ve come away with the belief that they’re up for a discussion around some additional text or something that can bring comfort on this issue, but the idea that the backstop is going to go away is for the birds.”
The leading Tory Brexiter and former Cabinet minister, John Whittingdale, said Selmayr had asked “whether or not a letter which was legally binding might be sufficient. But I think we would need to see what that contains and to have an absolute assurance that it does give us an exit.”
However, as MPs gave their account of the meeting, Selmayr tweeted a clarification and issued a warning to Westminster.
“On the EU side, nobody is considering this,” Selmayr said of a legal addition to the withdrawal agreement. “Asked whether any assurance would help to get the withdrawal agreement through the Commons, the answers of MPs were … inconclusive … The meeting confirmed that the EU did well to start its no-deal preparations in December 2017.”
On a visit to Japan, the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, expressed her hopes of finding a compromise despite the EU’s position of ruling out a renegotiation. She said: “To solve this point you have to be creative and listen to each other, and such discussions can and must be conducted.
“We can still use the time to come to an agreement over the things that are standing in our way, if everyone shows goodwill.”
Theresa May is due in Belfast today before returning to Brussels for talks about her demands for a renegotiation of the withdrawal agreement in an attempt to replace the backstop with “alternative arrangements”.