The prime minister is both the only elected politician accountable on UK–EU negotiations and the face of the UK’s efforts to tackle coronavirus he may well soon need to choose which he wants to spend his time on. Johnson deliberately set up the UK’s EU negotiating team to report directly to him, through special adviser and chief negotiator David Frost. The biggest demand on the UK side is on prime ministerial bandwidth. With so many lives at stake, Covid-19 planning clearly ranks above any wrangles over ‘ level playing field’ terms and the details of legal texts. But governments across Europe are prioritising their responses to what the prime minister describes as the “biggest public health crisis in a generation”.
But while video-conferencing offers a short-term fix, the problems facing the negotiations as a whole run much deeper.īoth sides have big decisions to make. The next is already feeling the effects of the Covid-19 pandemic – the EU delegation will not travel to the UK and the two sides are looking for alternative ways to carry out the talks. We have had one round of UK–EU negotiations. Negotiations are already being disrupted – but that’s only the beginning In light of this, Johnson’s already herculean task to negotiate, ratify and implement a new relationship with the European Union by 31 December is surely thrown into doubt.
The talk was of disruption lasting many weeks, or months.
A week that was supposed to be a victory tour, following a spending splurge on election priorities, instead saw Johnson appearing in a series of sombre press conferences, flanked by the chief medical officer and chief scientific adviser. Response to the coronavirus dominated the Johnson administration’s first budget. It is hard to see why Brexit would be immune to this. As every day passes, the scale of disruption to normal life – and lives – is growing. Face-to-face negotiations between the UK and EU planned for 16 March have been called off, but UK ministers are sticking to the line that their Brexit timetable still holds.