UK could rejoin the EU within four years, Barnier suggests

The UK could rejoin the European Union in as little as four years, the bloc’s former chief Brexit negotiator has suggested.

Michel Barnier said the “door is open” to the UK taking up membership again and the process would be “more rapid” than the Brexit negotiations that saw the UK leave the bloc.

But he warned the £5bn annual rebate from the EU’s budget negotiated by Margaret Thatcher would likely be “off the table” in any future agreement.

He told the BBC’s  Sunday With Laura Kuenssberg the Brexit negotiations were “very complicated and very long, perhaps too long, because it was very complex to leave”.

In part that was because the UK’s departure meant also leaving 600 international agreements, he said.

But, he added: “I think it could be more rapid to rejoin or to open a new negotiation on one goal or another.”

The UK voted to leave in June 2016, it was not until March the following year that Theresa May formally triggered Article 50 of the EU's Lisbon Treaty, setting in motion the process of withdrawal.

Britain eventually left the bloc in 31 January 2020.

Mr Barnier said he hoped negotiations over a return would be considerably swifter, as he pointed to the areas where the EU and the UK had not diverged despite Brexit.

“So I think, and I hope, in that case that the negotiation will be more rapid and more quick,” he said.

The rebate would be “off the table” in any future agreement, because “we are speaking of a new situation, and it cannot be exactly as the past situation before the Brexit,” he said.

But there would be no fee simply to rejoin: “There will be the usual contribution of any member state to build to the European budget.”

He also reiterated his belief that Britain cannot rejoin the EU without accepting freedom of movement.

He said there could be “no cherry picking” of the single market’s four freedoms - goods, people, services and capital.

The Irish former premier who helped negotiate Brexit, Leo Varadkar, has also warned that Britain would be unlikely to get a £5 billion annual rebate from the EU again if it rejoined.

Culture secretary Lisa Nandy acknowledged there would be “trade-offs” for Britain as it seeks to get closer to the EU again.

Asked by the BBC whether reports of a 150,000 cap on the number of Europeans who could come to Britain under a youth mobility scheme  would be acceptable to her Leave-voting constituents in Wigan, she said: “Well, we’ll have those conversations with our European counterparts, but we’ll also have those conversations too with the British people, because it is right to say that there are costs as well as benefits to a closer relationship with the European Union.

“There are trade-offs to be made, and we can’t cut people out of that conversation.”

Ms Nandy also suggested she was personally not in favour of going as far as rejoining the bloc in the bid for a closer relationship.

“The only thing that I think the British people are absolutely united on right now is that we left the European Union a decade ago with the promise of a close Brexit deal and the promise of benefits from that deal, and most of those have not been realised,” she said.

“It’s not working for people across this country, and we’ve got to do better.”