LONDON — Boris Johnson has put the U.K. on a "collision course" with the EU and Ireland with his insistence that the backstop plan for avoiding a hard border must be torn up, Irish Foreign Minister Simon Coveney said.

Speaking in Northern Ireland, Coveney said that the new prime minister's House of Commons statement, in which he called the backstop "unacceptable" to any country valuing its independence or its "self-respect," had been "very unhelpful."

"He seems to have made a deliberate decision to set Britain on a collision course with the European Union and with Ireland in relation to the Brexit negotiations, and I think only he can answer the question as to why he is doing that," Coveney said.

"It’s been made very clear [by Irish and EU leaders] that the approach that the British prime minster seems to now be taking is not going to be the basis of an agreement and that’s worrying for everybody … From a Brexit negotiating perspective it was a very bad day yesterday and we’ll have to see if that message coming from London changes in the weeks ahead.”

Johnson's immediate intentions vis-à-vis Brexit talks are coming into sharper focus.

The comments, which came after a meeting with the U.K.'s new Northern Ireland secretary, Julian Smith, on efforts to re-establish devolved government in Belfast, are the starkest assessment yet by a leading EU politician of Johnson's Brexit plans.

Johnson's plan to strip out the backstop — which would see the U.K. remain in a de facto customs union with the EU to avoid checks at the frontier with Ireland — and replace it with a number of technological and administrative fixes for ensuring the free passage of goods, would require the legally binding Withdrawal Agreement struck with the EU by Theresa May in November last year to be reopened.

In a message to EU27 diplomats this week, the EU's chief Brexit negotiator Michel Barnier said eliminating the backstop is "not within the mandate of the European Council" — in other words a clear U-turn from EU leaders on the issue is needed for any progress to be made.

Johnson reiterated his position in a late-night call with French President Emmanuel Macron on Thursday, Downing Street said.

France’s EU affairs minister, Amélie de Montchalin, told TV channel France 2 Friday that Macron will “have Boris Johnson over in the coming weeks.”

“I don’t know where and when it will happen,” she said, “but we wish to work with him. Work. We need that, he’s a partner who will remain a partner especially after Brexit. It is a country that remains very close to us, we have always had very close ties in defense, economy … we have social and cultural ties, the future relation will be very strong.”

She added: “We have always said that if the U.K. wants to leave the EU, and if it wants to do it in an orderly way, the best we have is the deal.”

“If there is no deal, deep down it means that we won’t have a relationship based on trust,” she said.

Johnson spoke with German Chancellor Angela Merkel on Friday, the German government said, and he was invited to Berlin "in the near future." He is yet to speak to Irish Prime Minister Leo Varadkar.

But Johnson's immediate intentions vis-à-vis Brexit talks are coming into sharper focus. While he insisted on Thursday he is ready to talk “wherever, whenever,” his spokesman on Friday morning acknowledged that — because reopening the Withdrawal Agreement would require a new mandate from EU27 leaders — “if these issues are to be settled, they will be settled at leader level, at European Council.”

Johnson has said that if he cannot get a new deal, he will take the U.K. out of the EU without one "do or die" on October 31. To prepare the country he has ordered the new chancellor, Sajid Javid, to release additional funding on top of the the £4.2 billion already allocated by the government to no-deal readiness. His former Vote Leave campaign ally Michael Gove, the new Cabinet Office minister, has been placed in charge of no-deal preparations.

However, there is no majority in the U.K. parliament for a no-deal exit, and Johnson is expected to face a concerted effort by opposition MPs and Conservative rebels — including several former senior ministers from May's government — to block the U.K. leaving without a deal in place, when parliament returns from its summer recess in September.