Britain’s Prime Minister Boris Johnson attending a remote press conference on the COVID-19 pandemic inside 10 Downing Street in central London on Monday. Agence France-Presse

Jon Stone, The Independent

When EU and UK trade negotiators first met in Brussels on a rainy day in early March, the impact of coronavirus was largely limited to extra bottles of hand sanitiser on desks in the conference centre. But two months on, the pandemic has changed the political assumptions underpinning the next seven months of Brexit negotiations – if not the parties’ public positions.

This week, negotiations are back again, with around 200 officials logging on to videoconference with each other about the finer points of EU-UK trade. But despite the limited time available to conclude a deal, it took weeks to agree to go ahead with remote talks – with two planned “rounds” cancelled in the meantime.

There has been some dispute about what the hold-up on starting videoconferencing was. Some reports had suggested that the European Commission side was more sceptical that going online could replace in-the-room negotiations. But one EU official insists that “it was the exact opposite”.

“Actually it was the UK, they were not so sure about the process of doing so and the security of it,” they told The Independent. The dispute over how things went down will be familiar to anyone who has been following Brexit talks since the beginning.

Whoever held things up, both sides eventually settled on using WebEx, an enterprise-grade videoconferencing suite produced by software company Cisco with more robust security than commercial-grade apps like Zoom and Skype.

Slightly frostier negotiations at a technical level may not end up being the biggest problem that coronavirus has caused, however. The policy sticking points between the two sides are well known and acknowledged by both teams: on fishing, the level playing field for regulations, a role for the European Court of Justice, adherence to the European Convention on Human Rights, and governance of the deal.

All of these are big political issues: negotiators sitting down and going through the minutia can only make so much progress – whether they are friends or not. Observers of the talks say political calls have to be made, and they have to be made by politicians.

This is a more significant effect of the pandemic. The British government does not have the political bandwidth to make calls on Brexit at the moment: the focus in Westminster, as in all national capitals, is resolutely on dealing with the COVID-19 outbreak. It’s just that most other national capitals haven’t decided to totally reorder their relationship with their neighbours at precisely the same time as the pandemic, or staked their political reputation on sticking to a rigid timetable.

“The top of government just isn’t focused on the talks right now – rightly so – they’re dealing with the pandemic and the fallout; Boris Johnson’s been unwell,” says Mr Lowe.

For the country to even have the political headspace to debate these questions, the political situation in the UK would have to return to something like last year, with Brexit dominating the airwaves. As it is, the UK government has been candid that it has redeployed 47 officials from Brexit duties to fighting fires elsewhere in government because of the pandemic.

With this in mind, it’s notable that both sides agree coronavirus hasn’t really changed anyone’s mind about anything – at least officially. Instead of blowing a wind of disruption through the parties’ positions, they’ve effectively been put in the deep freeze, to be acted out by negotiators going through the motions while the politicians deal with something else.

A UK government source close to talks agrees: “I don’t think the crisis makes any difference to it, to be honest. I do sense that Barnier himself would like to get a deal and I sensed that before the crisis started.”

But British officials are aware that big political calls need to be made, and that the prime minister and his cabinet will have to get their hands dirty eventually.

The source speculates that the prime minister might rear his head on Brexit in the run-up to the “stock take” scheduled for mid-June, where the decision on an extension on the transition period will need to be made and Boris Johnson will sit down with European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen – probably by video conference.

The question of an extension is a vexed one. Under the agreement signed by Boris Johnson, the transition period can be extended by up to two years, but the extension must be agreed in June, to give businesses on both sides of the channel time to prepare for the actual cliff edge in December.

How coronavirus affects the question of an extension is politically complicated. A simple reading is that a pandemic is exactly the kind of reasonable excuse for a delay a pragmatic government, seeing talks stuck, might be searching for. Poll after poll has shown the public firmly supportive of and totally understanding of an extension, given the pandemic situation: the latest survey from pollster Focaldata has 66 per cent of voters supporting a delay, including 48 per cent of Conservative voters and 45 per cent of Brexit Party supporters.

“The only question that matters now is what does Boris Johnson want to do – because if Boris Johnson decides it’s in his political interests to extend the transition I have no doubt that he could sell it,” says Mr Lowe.

This situation has led to another, very different theory about how COVID-19 might affect the politics of an extension.

“I think that the United Kingdom politicians and government have certainly decided that Covid is going to be blamed for all the fallout from Brexit and my perception of it is they don’t want to drag the negotiations out into 2021 because they can effectively blame Covid for everything,” the EU’s trade commissioner Phil Hogan theorised in public last week.

Under this account, which is circulating as much in Westminster as it is in Brussels, no-deal won’t be such a big deal, because the UK economy is already in the intensive care ward thanks to the coronavirus lockdown. What’s a few per cent of GDP between friends? But this line of thinking, Mr Lowe says, would be a mistake for political as well as economic reasons.

The EU, for its part, has said it is happy to facilitate an extension – but is aware of the political situation in the UK. Ireland’s deputy Prime Minister Simon Coveney spelt out the EU’s conundrum on Friday.

“I wouldn’t be raising expectations around the British government agreeing to seeking more time. If we’re going to have any chance of persuading them to take more time then we need to be careful about how we do that because demanding it from them … almost as a concession to the EU, is certainly not the way to do it,” he said.

But one UK source close to negotiations thinks COVID-19 actually makes an extension even more unpalatable, and insists that they’re serious about not wanting to delay. The looming pandemic rescue package being cooked up in the EU, they argue, could herald a fundamental shift in EU policy that Britain never signed up for.