Officials believe exit will be delayed but suspect May will not ask for enough extra time

EU officials fear Theresa May is setting the UK on course for a no-deal exit at the end of June because she will not have the political courage to ask for the longer Brexit delay they believe she needs.

Senior figures in Brussels have been war-gaming the likely next steps by the British government, and believe a delay to the UK’s exit date of 29 March is inevitable.

But they fear the prime minister’s strategy of seeking simply to survive from day to day will lead to her requesting an inadequate short three-month extension for fear of enraging Brexiters in the Conservative party.

EU officials and diplomats said the danger of the UK then crashing out in the summer was an underappreciated risk given that the escalation of no-deal planning and the cries of betrayal by Brexiters would give momentum to a cliff-edge Brexit.

On Thursday the British foreign secretary, Jeremy Hunt, became the first cabinet minister to admit that the two years of negotiations allowed under article 50 may have to be prolonged, describing the Brexit impasse as “a very challenging situation”.

EU sources suggested it was unlikely that the heads of state and government of the 27 member states would reject such a request given the pressure that would be applied from the business community.

On Thursday, Portugal’s foreign minister, Augusto Santos Silva, said he believed a delay would be the wisest course given May’s hopes of a renegotiation.

Q&A What is the Brady amendment? Show Hide The Brady amendment demands that the backstop arrangement in the EU withdrawal agreement to prevent a hard border in Northern Ireland should be replaced with 'alternative arrangements'. The backstop is hated by many Tory Brexiters because it would keep the UK in an effective customs union until an alternative solution could be found to prevent the need for infrastructure at the border. The backstop has no time limit and exit can be only by joint agreement between the UK and the EU. Brexiters would like to see the backstop replaced either by an as-yet-unknown technological solution to ensure a smooth border or at least an end date or a unilateral exit mechanism.



In order to seek this from Brussels, Theresa May decided the government should back an amendment tabled by Sir Graham Brady, a Tory backbencher, which said the backstop should be replaced. She also pledged to reopen the withdrawal agreement and change the text.

The European Union has been adamant that both things cannot happen, but Downing Street believes that gaining a majority in the House of Commons for the change would demonstrate the crucial breakthrough needed to avoid a no-deal Brexit.

After initial scepticism, members of the hard-Brexit European Research Group swung behind the government, though Tory remainers rebelled against it, and the amendment passed by 16 votes. However, the group has made it clear it will not necessarily back whichever compromise she may come back with.

“We have negotiated an agreement and the British parliament now says: we do not like this backstop clause, we have a better one,” Silva said. “What we are saying is: show us a better one. Still more preferable would be to prolong, to delay the moment of departure, to have time to rationally revisit all this.”

The EU will try to shape the process if the UK makes a request, and its deputy chief negotiator, Sabine Weyand, said on Monday that the EU’s heads of state and government would need information on “the purpose of an extension”, adding: “The idea of going into serial extensions really isn’t very popular in the EU27.”

But EU diplomats say the bar is likely to be low should the UK want to delay Brexit, “although that might well just be delaying the agony”, one said.

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Mujtaba Rahman, a former UK Treasury and European commission official, who is head of Europe for the Eurasia Group risk consultancy, said: “There’s a growing realisation in the EU that the UK might need longer to get its house in order than the UK itself realises.

“The bar to extending article 50 for the EU will be quite low – leaders love to kick the can. If there is a contentious issue, it’s more about the length of any article 50 extension as opposed to the principle of whether there should be one.”

May is getting ready to head back to Brussels, in an attempt to reopen the Brexit deal that she negotiated over the past 18 months, having been told by parliament to replace the Irish backstop in the withdrawal agreement with an “alternative arrangement”.

Brexiters fear the backstop, which would keep the UK in a customs union unless an alternative solution can similarly avoid a hard border on the island of Ireland, will stand in the way of the forging of an independent trade policy.

In a call with Donald Tusk, the president of the European council, on Wednesday afternoon, May was asked to come up with “concrete proposals” but did not offer any new thinking, failing even to cite the previous suggestions of a time limit or unilateral exit mechanism.

On Thursday, the Dutch prime minister, Mark Rutte, tweeted after a phonecall with the European commission president, Jean-Claude Juncker, that Brexit was “now in final phase”.

“The EU is united; the withdrawal agreement is the best and only deal on the table. Awaiting proposal from UK that is acceptable to EU and will enable ratification in the UK,” he said.

The EU is not planning any concessions before the prime minister faces another vote in the Commons on 14 February. It is feared there will instead be a series of difficult weeks before a regular leaders’ summit in March, just seven days before the UK is due to leave the bloc, when the two sides could be forced to act.

Next Monday, the Commons select committee for exiting the EU, led by the Labour MP Hilary Benn, is planning to travel to Brussels to question the European commission’s secretary-general, Martin Selmayr, and the European parliament’s Brexit coordinator, Guy Verhofstadt, over the next steps.