UK Brexit negotiator to meet EU officials in Brussels despite Boris Johnson claim there would be no talks

Prime minister said last week he and his team would only sit down with EU if bloc first agreed to scrap backstop

The UK’s Brexit negotiator is heading to Brussels for meetings with EU officials, despite a claim by Boris Johnson that the UK would stay away until the bloc scraps the controversial backstop.

The prime minister said last week that he and his team would only sit down with the EU if it agreed to reopen the withdrawal agreement and ditch the Irish border policy, which Brussels has repeatedly said it will not do.

But despite Mr Johnson’s tough public message, his new Brexit chief, David Frost, headed to Brussels on Wednesday for two days of meetings with EU officials in Michel Barnier’s team.

Officials on the UK side downplayed the meetings as merely “introductory” and said they would not be negotiations, but merely an opportunity for the UK to lay out Mr Johnson’s position across three separate meetings.

“In his role as the prime minister’s Europe adviser, David Frost is visiting Brussels to have introductory meetings with key officials and to pass on the prime minister’s message in person,” a UK government spokesperson said.

“The UK is leaving the EU on 31 October whatever the circumstances. We will work energetically for a deal but the backstop must be abolished. If we are not able to reach an agreement then we will of course have to leave the EU without a deal.”

Mr Frost was appointed last week to replace Olly Robbins, Theresa May’s Brexit chief negotiator who handled talks until her departure.

In his statement to the Commons last week the prime minister said that “I, my team, and ... the secretary of state for exiting the European Union are ready to meet and talk” with the EU only on the “basis” that “the Irish border issues are dealt with where they should always have been: in the negotiations on the future agreement between the UK and the EU”.

A spokesperson for Mr Johnson later added that he would not want to meet with EU leaders until their position on the backstop changed. Since Article 50 was triggered in 2016, the EU has refused to have any face-to-face Brexit talks between national leaders and the UK prime minister, preferring instead for discussions to be conducted at a formal official level.

The EU has said it will not reopen the withdrawal agreement, and as far back as December last year Jean-Claude Juncker, the European Commission president, said there was “no room whatsoever” to renegotiate the withdrawal agreement. In May he reiterated: “I was crystal clear, there will be no renegotiation.”