A leading Brexiter has claimed to have seen an extract of the UK’s draft withdrawal agreement and says it will give voting rights to all EU citizens who stay in the UK.

Daniel Hannan, a Conservative founder of Vote Leave, told fellow Conservative MEPs on Thursday that he had been given sight of key Brexit papers, which are supposed to be a closely-guarded secret among senior ministers and civil servants.

In a WhatsApp message to other MEPs, Hannan said that the agreement would give voting rights to all EU citizens in England and Northern Ireland. He went on to say that voting rights were devolved in Scotland and Wales. The leading Brexiter questioned why the government had struck the deal saying it should have negotiated separate agreements with each EU country.

The disclosure of the message will raise questions as to why Hannan appears to have been given sight of such crucial documents. It will also raise the hopes of millions of EU citizens living in the UK who were unsure whether they would be able to vote in future elections.

The leak of the WhatsApp messages to the Guardian comes as the Brexit secretary, Dominic Raab, said the UK government had no plans to set out a no-deal technical notice for EU citizens’ rights.

On the messages, Hannan wrote: “I just saw an extract of the draft withdrawal agreement. Britain has decided to enfranchise all EU nationals (at least in England and NI – it’s devolved in Scotland and Wales.) What an odd decision: why offer a blanket deal instead of country by country bilaterals? For what it’s worth, it will significantly bolster the non-Tory electorate.” Hannan did not respond to a request for a comment.

Speaking in the Commons, Raab did not elaborate or give a timeframe for how the rights would be spelt out. “The issue of citizens’ rights is on a scale and a level of importance and sensitivity which means it will not be done in technical notices but in a different format.”

Labour said that the Department for Exiting the EU’s refusal to issue a technical notice was a broken promise, pointing to a Department of Transport notice which said “a technical notice on EU citizens in the UK will be published soon”.

Though EU citizens currently in the UK received a guarantee that they would receive settled status after Brexit, negotiations about some future rights are still ongoing, including their right to return to live in Britain even if they leave the country for some years.

After the EU summit in Salzburg this year, Theresa May said the UK would guarantee the 3 million EU nationals living in the UK that “your rights will be protected, even in the event of no deal”.

The House of Commons’ Brexit select committee noted in July that voting rights were a sticking point in negotiations and that the EU had “declined to consider a reciprocal agreement for the continuation of voting rights as part of the withdrawal agreement negotiations”.

A government spokesperson said: “This is not within the scope of the Withdrawal Agreement. We have always been clear that the voting rights of both UK nationals living in the EU and EU nationals living in the UK should be considered together and that we’re committed to doing bilateral deals to achieve this.”







