UK foreign secretary says EU needs to ‘step back from the abyss’

UK foreign secretary Jeremy Hunt has urged EU leaders to "step back from the abyss" of a no-deal Brexit and to engage with Theresa May's Chequers plan.

Following the angry clashes of the Salzburg summit, Mr Hunt said it was "counterproductive" to "insult" Britain's referendum vote and to say the only way the UK could legally leave was by "breaking up your country".

“What we need to be doing in a situation like this is bringing people together,” he told the BBC Radio 4 Today programme.

“This is a time for people in the EU to step back from the abyss, to sit down and to talk to us about how we can make these sensible, concrete proposals actually work.”

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Disruption

Mr Hunt warned there would be “disruption” on both sides of the Channel in the event of a disorderly Brexit, with one estimate suggesting a million jobs could be lost across the EU.

"What Theresa May is saying is 'Don't mistake British politeness for weakness. If you put us in a difficult corner we will stand our ground. That is the kind of country we are,'" he told the Today programme.

“Insulting her on social media, getting to these stand-offs where you are calling people liars and so on is not the way we are going to get a solution to this difficult situation.”

Mr Hunt refused to rule out the prospect that the Government could now seek a simple, Canada-style free trade agreement — as many Tory MPs want rather than the more ambitious Chequers plan.

"I am not dismissing anything," he said. "We think these proposals are better than the Canada proposals because they work better on the Northern Irish border."