No 10 insists fishing waters will be under UK control after Varadkar remarks

Here is the Times’s Steven Swinford on the significant of the PMOS’s comments on fishing.

The PMOS is not talking about some of the post-Brexit Whitehall arrangements.

He says there will be 40 officials working in government taskforce on the EU future partnership.

He says after Friday the UK will no longer sit with the EU at international meetings.

Our permanent representative to the EU, Sir Tim Barrow, will become ambassador to the EU.

And he says the ministers will be making visits abroad to promote the UK.

The PMOS says Michael Gove will oversee the withdrawal agreement, but the PM will oversee the negotiation.

And that’s it. The briefing is over.

The PMOS says after Friday night the Brexit department will not exist. Asked about Stephen Barclay’s position as Brexit secretary, he says that there will be no department, but that cabinet reshuffle decisions are a matter for the PM.

Yesterday Barclay said that his gut feeling was that HS2 would go ahead. Asked if the PM trusts Barclay’s gut, the PMOS says:

In relation to HS2, discussion is ongoing. Once a decision is reached, we will let you know.

He says this was made clear in the PM’s election manifesto.

Asked if this means the government is ruling out linking the two issues in trade talks, the PMOS repeats the point about taking back control of fishing waters. He says the PM has left the EU in “no doubt of our determination on that issue”.

He says the government will decide for itself who accesses its fishing waters.

The PMOS says the government will consider the recommendations made by the migration advisory committee in a report coming this week, and then bring forward an immigration bill in due course.

Asked about the US refusal to extradite the US diplomat’s wife accused of killing Harry Dunn in a road accident, the PMOS says the PM sees this as a denial of justice.

What more will the government do?

We said on Friday that we were urgently looking at our options, the PMOS says. He says this point will be made to Mike Pompeo, the US secretary of state, when he visits the UK this week.

The PM will be speaking shortly at the UK’s commemorative ceremony for Holocaust Memorial Day, the PMOS says.

The briefing is taking place in 9 Downing Street. These briefings used to be held in the Commons, but No 10 changed the arrangements this year, ostensibly to make it easier for officials to brief journalists, as well as the PMOS (prime minister’s official spokesman.

The spokesman starts by reading out a list of what the PM and other ministers are doing today.

I am at the No 10 lobby briefing, where the prime minister’s spokesman, James Slack, is briefing journalists.

In the past these briefings were embargoed until they were over. But the rules were changed last week, and so now I can live blog from the meeting.

Michel Barnier, the EU’s chief Brexit negotiator, and Leo Varadkar, the Irish taoiseach, have been holding a press conference in Dublin. Varadkar said that, if Brexit does not work out and the UK wants to rejoin the EU, it would be welcome back.

These are from Sky’s Stephen Murphy, the BBC’s Chris Page and the Irish government (aka Merrion Street).

The BBC’s interview with Leo Varadkar, the Irish taoiseach, was thorough and candidate. Laura Kuenssberg has written a blog about what Varadkar told her that you can read here, and I’ve already posted some quotes. Here is a fuller summary.

Varadkar suggested that the UK would fail to get a trade deal allowing its banks access to the EU’s financial services market unless it agree to let EU boats carry on fishing in its waters. (See 9.02am.)

He said he thought the EU would be in a stronger position than the UK in the forthcoming trade negotiation. Asked if the EU would have the upper hands in the talks, he said:

The reality of situation is that the European Union is a union of 27 member states. The UK is only one country. And we have a population and a market of 450 million people. The UK, it’s about 60. So if these were two teams up against each other playing football, who do you think has the stronger team? So long as we’re united.

He said that the British did not understand Ireland very well, and that this was a problem for London during the first round of the Brexit talks. He said:

A lot of people, unfortunately, in Westminster, and in Britain, don’t understand Ireland, or know much about Ireland. And that’s one thing that we actually find hard to understand because if you grow up in Ireland, you know, we speak English as our first language, most of us do anyway. We watch the BBC, we watch Graham Norton, we watch your television, your news. We really understand a lot about Britainn.

But I think a lot of British people don’t understand a lot about Ireland, including your politicians. And that’s what was very badly exposed I think during the whole Brexit process …

I think, that a lot of people in Britain underestimated the fact that European partners will stay by us. You know, Britain has a very powerful history, a very colonial history. And I think there were people in Britain who thought that France, Germany and Britain would get together at a big summit and tell the small countries what’s what. That’s not the way the 21st century works, that’s certainly not the way the European Union works.

There is plenty of evidence to support what Varadkar is saying, and the Atlantic’s Tom McTague came up with a new anecdote last week which supports the claim that the cabinet underestimated Ireland. In an article about how the UK could emulate Canada after Brexit, he says:

In Britain’s negotiations with Ireland over Brexit, some senior politicians in London were dismissive of the effectiveness of Irish diplomacy. One cabinet minister, who asked for anonymity because of the sensitivity of the negotiations, told me that Ireland was a small country, which meant that the quality of its ministers could not match that of those in the UK. And yet this attitude proved part of London’s undoing in the negotiations, which saw Ireland win more of its objectives than Britain did.

Varadkar said that he did not know if Brexit would increase the chances of Ireland reuniting.

He said he thought it would be “possible” but “difficult” to conclude a UK-EU trade deal before the end of this year.

He said that Johnson had personally assured him that he did not want the UK to undercut EU standards after Brexit. He said:

I think the area where it’s going to become tricky is this whole idea of a level playing field. Because there’s a genuine concern across the European Union, that part of the motivation behind Brexit was for the UK to undercut us in terms of environmental standards, labour standards, product standards, food standards, all of those things. Now when I meet Prime Minister Johnson he says, no absolutely not that’s not the kind United Kingdom that I want to need as prime minister. But we want that written down in law, we want that in a treaty so that we know that the UK will not be undercutting the EU with lower standards.

Varadakar insisted that there would be a need for some checks on goods going from Britain to Northern Ireland after Brexit. Johnson has repeatedly played down the need for these checks, telling a news conference in Belfast recently that these checks would only apply in the absence of a zero tariff, zero quota trade deal. But Varadkar said:

Goods coming in to Northern Ireland, which may come across the border into the European Union, Ireland, the single market – then there will be checks required at ports and airports in Northern Ireland. But it is absolutely our wish and our desire that they should be minimised.