‘There will be no negotiation strands’

he European Union has squashed David Davis’s hopes of nailing down a detailed outline of the future UK-EU trade agreement before the Brexit deadline expires.

“There will be no negotiation strands, no ‘hundreds’ of British negotiators,” one EU diplomat told The Telegraph, referring to the Brexit Secretary’s plans for expansive pre-Brexit trade talks.

“Trade negotiations will not start properly until after 29 March 2019. Before that we must get the fundamentals right,” the source said.

The Telegraph revealed this week that Mr Davis and Olly Robbins, the UK’s leading Brexit official, were at loggerheads of the size of the trade declaration, with Mr Davis pushing an expansive vision.