Downing Street and the EU moved a step closer to resuming formal Brexit talks yesterday after Brussels made a concession to try to break the four-day impasse. Michel Barnier told his

counterpart, Lord Frost, in a phone call that the EU was willing to “intensify talks in London this week, on all subjects and based on legal texts”. Brussels’ refusal to begin work on a

joint legal text of a deal before all areas have been agreed in principle had been one of two sticking points that led Boris Johnson to call off the negotiations on Friday. However, Mr

Barnier is understood to have given no indication that the EU is prepared to cede to the prime minister’s other demand: that the EU accept that it will have to make concessions to get a

deputy vice-president of the European Commission, suggested that Brussels accepted that any deal “has to be a fair agreement for both sides”. He was echoing comments made by Angela Merkel,

the German chancellor, at the weekend in which she said the EU was “ready to compromise” and that fishing rights needed to be on the table. Downing Street said that despite a “constructive

discussion”, Brussels still needed to move further. “This means an EU approach consistent with trying to find an agreement between sovereign equals and with acceptance that movement needs to

come from the EU side as well as the UK,” a spokesman said. Speaking in the Commons, Michael Gove, the Cabinet Office minister, praised the “constructive tone and pragmatic spirit”

demonstrated by Mr Sefcovic and his team in talks on Northern Ireland. Mr Gove, who is in charge of no-deal Brexit preparations, initially told MPs that the EU had “refused to negotiate

seriously” in recent weeks. As he was at the dispatch box the EU statement was released and Mr Gove struck an emollient tone, claiming that Mr Barnier’s comment was a “reflection of the

strength and resolution” that Mr Johnson had shown. Advertisement An EU diplomatic source said that Mr Barnier had made the public concession to get talks back on track after a hiccup many

European governments regard as an overreaction. “We do not have the luxury of letting this drag on,” the source said. Rachel Reeves, the shadow Cabinet Office minister, said Labour expected

the prime minister to broker an arrangement to enable Britain to trade freely with the EU. “They can call it no-deal, they can call it an Australia deal, they can call it a Narnia deal as

far as I’m concerned, but let’s be honest about what that means and let’s be honest about how damaging it is for the country.” After a Tory MP shouted “it’s not damaging”, Ms Reeves said:

“Ten per cent tariffs on British cars exported to the EU, that is damage. Forty per cent tariffs on lamb being exported to the EU, that is damage. And if any member wants to tell British

industry and tell British farming that that is not damaging, be my guest. But it’s not the truth.” Separately, a cross-party study by the Commons committee on the future relationship with

the European Union has insisted that protecting the rights of EU citizens must be a priority after the UK leaves the bloc. The study noted that the government must ensure that “as many

people as possible understand what they need to do to secure their rights, and that as few as possible are inadvertently deprived of these rights because they did not act in time, or did not

know they had to do”. Advertisement The study found that while it remains unclear how many EU citizens will apply for the EU settlement scheme in the UK, it has already received more than

four million applications, of which “a large percentage of applicants were successful”. However, it warned that the number of EU citizens who were eligible to apply for settled status but

had yet to do so remained unknown. “Whatever happens with the negotiations, nobody who has built a life outside their country of birth should run the risk of being forced to leave simply

because they inadvertently slipped through the net by not claiming the rights that are theirs,” Hilary Benn, the Labour committee chairman, said.