Dominic Raab, the Brexit secretary, has expressed his frustration to EU officials over Michel Barnier’s alleged failure to make himself available for face-to-face talks.



Despite the EU negotiator’s claims that he was available “24/7” for talks, Barnier was said to have been resistant to requests for lengthy meetings with Raab to discuss the details of the UK’s proposals, hammered out at Chequers.

The British cabinet minister was granted only a two-hour meeting with Barnier last week, and was initially offered only a three-hour slot this Friday, due to the former French minister’s diary constraints, the Guardian has learned.

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Barnier – who tweeted a picture of himself on Sunday posing in the sun in Albertville, in his home region of Savoie in south-east France – has been in Germany, and was understood to be again leaving Brussels for Croatia on Friday afternoon, following what was set to be an early morning meeting with Raab.

Barnier subsequently changed his flights, however. Five hours of talks with Raab are now pencilled in to his diary awaiting confirmation, it is understood.

An EU official said: “The commission is working for a deal. Negotiation agendas, including meetings between principals, are decided jointly. The aim of the meetings between the principals is to take stock of progress made at technical and coordinator level.”

Raab, who was appearing before a House of Lords committee on Wednesday, insisted that a deal was in sight. “I think it is important as we enter the final phase of the negotiations in the lead-up to the October council – and the possibility that it may creep beyond that – we want to see some renewed energy,” he told peers.

He struck an upbeat note throughout most of the 90-minute questioning, saying he was “stubbornly optimistic”, and would not “beg” the EU for a deal.

However, he appeared to question whether Britain would consider itself bound to pay the almost £40bn financial settlement it agreed to last December, if a final deal is not forthcoming by March.

“I don’t think it could be safely assumed on anyone’s side that the financial settlement that has been agreed as part of the withdrawal bill would then just be paid, in precisely the same shape or speed or rate, if there was no deal,” he said.

The remaining challenges were laid bare when Barnier, who met the German foreign affairs minister on Wednesday in Berlin and will hold talks with the German minister for the economy on Thursday, reiterated his stance that the UK’s proposals on cross border trade in goods after Brexit would undermine the EU’s single market.

Ahead of his face-to-face talks on Friday with Raab, Barnier admitted that the negotiations were at a difficult and sensitive stage.

He said: “We are prepared to offer Britain a partnership such as there never has been with any other third country.

“We respect Britain’s red lines scrupulously. In return, they must respect what we are. Single market means single market ... There is no single market à la carte.”

Barnier added that Norway’s model, under which the UK would allow free movement of people in return for the benefits of the free flow of trade, was still available.

Currency traders appeared to interpret Barnier’s comments as a sign that the British government’s lobbying in favour of the Chequers proposals was working, pushing sterling to a three-week high against the dollar – an understanding that EU sources were quick to quash.

Barnier has claimed repeatedly in past months that the economic and security deal so far offered by Brussels, dismissed as unacceptable by Downing Street, is unlike anything the EU has struck before.

The two sides pledged earlier this summer to have continuous Brexit talks in the final stage of the negotiations, with Barnier insisting a deal needed to be struck by “the beginning of November, but not much later than that”.

But UK officials were said to be “tearing their hair out” at the EU’s failure to live up to their pledges to intensify talks at the highest level. The issue has been a reversal of the positions earlier in the talks, when Barnier made the point to EU diplomats in private that he would have liked to see more of David Davis, the then Brexit secretary, in Brussels.

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The tension in the talks has been exacerbated by a lack of progress in the negotiations last week, despite claims by both sides that the discussions had been “positive”.

The Guardian has learned that discussions over Northern Ireland proved to be some of the most difficult yet, with both sides digging in. Irish government officials, briefed on the meeting, were told that the UK side had insisted that progress on avoiding a hard border on the island of Ireland could not be made unless there was progress on Chequers.

The EU, in turn, repeated that the British government needed to live up to the commitments it made on an “all-weather” solution to avoiding a hard border through a backstop solution in the withdrawal agreement, which would snap into place if a wider deal or bespoke technological solution did not solve the problem.

Sources said the talks were so difficult that the only positive that could be taken was that the clash between the officials had been aired now rather than later in the year.

Asked by peers about the frequency of talks on Wednesday, Raab said, “in relation to whatever tittle-tattle may appear in whatever newspapers, I shall be over in Brussels tomorrow evening for a long, substantive meeting on Friday: I hope that gives you the facts.”