Donald Tusk says getting Brexit deal by next autumn will be 'furious race against time' – as it happened

• Donald Tusk, president of the European council, has said that getting a Brexit withdrawal deal agreed by the autumn of next year will be a “furious race against time”. (See 4.38pm.)

• Michel Barnier, the EU’s chief Brexit negotiator, has said that David Davis, the Brexit secretary, was wrong to say a UK-EU trade deal could be signed just after Brexit. (See 5.08pm.)

• David Davis has scrambled to salvage relations with Brussels after he was accused of damaging trust in the Brexit talks by making inflammatory comments over the status of Britain’s promises. As Daniel Boffey reports, the Brexit secretary engaged in urgent telephone diplomacy on Tuesday in an attempt to persuade Guy Verhofstadt, the European parliament’s Brexit coordinator, that the UK government’s word could be depended upon. Brussels has been deeply irritated by Davis’s claim over the weekend that the UK’s concessions in an agreement struck last week with the EU to move talks on were merely a statement of intent without legal backing.

• Anna Soubry, a leading pro-European Tory, has urged ministers to “”reach out to the remainers” and compromise ahead of a vote on the EU withdrawal bill tomorrow where the government faces possible defeat. Ministers could lose because some Tories like Soubry are planning to back an amendment tabled by Dominic Grieve, the Conservative former attorney general, intended to give MPs a truly meaningful vote on the final Brexit deal. Speaking in this afternoon’s debate, Soubry said:

What I would urge all members of Her Majesty’s Government, especially those in the most important of positions, is please now reach out to the remainers - often called now former remainers, the 48%.

Don’t tar us with the same paintbrush that you yourself may have used for many, many years, and try and build a consensus. And that means the government has got to give a little bit more than it so far has given.

Speaking on the World at One, Grieve said that he had enough votes to defeat the government (opposition MPs are expected to support him) and that he would push his amendment to a vote tomorrow if the government did not compromise. He said:

I don’t see any possibility of my backing down on this at all. I will vote for my amendment. I don’t know whether I will be successful or not but I think I must push it forward. I don’t want to defeat the government. It is not my desire to do this, I would much prefer the government to listen to what we have been saying, accept the amendment, and, at a later stage, the government can always correct it if it wants to.

In a hint that the government may back down, the prime minister’s spokesman told journalists:

The government position has been throughout that we are listening to MPs and we are having conversations with them, and where we think the legislation can be improved, we are prepared to take it on board. I think what the MPs are asking for is clarity. We are looking at the amendment and will respond to it in due course.

There will be several votes when the debate ends tonight at around 9.10pm, but the most awkward vote for the government is scheduled for tomorrow.

• The boss of the US civil aviation regulator has urged the UK to reveal by next month whether it will remain in a key safety body after Brexit. As the Press Association reports, Michael Huerta of the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) flew from Washington to London on Tuesday for talks with transport secretary Chris Grayling before meetings with European Union officials in Brussels on Wednesday. He told reporters he wants to “bring a level of urgency” to the UK’s deliberations over what safety standards it will meet for the manufacture of aviation products and aircraft maintenance. The competency of UK firms is currently accepted by the FAA because the UK is a member of the EU’s European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA), which has a bilateral agreement with the US. Huerta said this status “essentially evaporates” with Brexit in March 2019 and the UK must decide whether to adopt the framework of EASA or create its own standards.

• The registration of 3 million EU nationals for “settled status” in Britain will involve an online application form with six to eight questions, a cost of no more than £72, and a decision delivered within two weeks, the immigration minister, Brandon Lewis, has said.

• The government has admitted households are feeling the pain from rising inflation after the cost of living rose to a near six-year high of 3.1% in November.

• Theresa May has restored the Conservative whip to Anne Marie Morris after the MP apologised again for using the N-word at an event earlier this year.

• Clive Lewis, the Labour MP and former shadow business secretary, has been cleared of allegations of sexual harassment after a party investigation.

That’s all from me for today.

Thanks for the comments.

Peter Foster, the Daily Telegraph’s Europe editor, has a good Twitter thread on the state of play in the Brexit talks. It starts here.

The (short) Michel Barnier press conference is now available here, as a video playback, on the European Union’s website. Here are is a summary of all the key points.

• Barnier, the EU’s chief Brexit negotiator, said the David Davis, the Brexit secretary, was wrong to say a UK-EU trade deal could be signed just after Brexit. (See 5.08pm.)

• He said the EU would not accept any “backtracking” by the UK.

Even if the European Council does recognise sufficient progress on Friday, we will have a final agreement only if the political commitments taken by Theresa May in the name of the British government last Friday are respected and we will be vigilant. We will not accept any backtracking from the UK from commitments in the joint report. All our points of agreement our now closed.

• He said that the UK-EU Brexit deal agreed last week had to be translated into “legally binding and precise language” so as to be ready for the withdrawal agreement. This is necessary because the withdrawal agreement will be an international treaty, unlike the document agreed last week.

• He said he wanted to get a draft of the withdrawal agreement ready “early” next year.

• He said he expected to start negotiating the transition deal in February.

• He said the UK still had to clarify what it wanted from the final deal.

Theresa May has restored the Conservative whip to Anne Marie Morris after the MP apologised again for using the N-word at an event earlier this year, my colleague Rowena Mason reports.

Back in the Commons Steve Baker, the Brexit minister, is responding on behalf of the government. He started by saying he had 134 amendments to respond to.

Responding to Dominic Grieve, the Conservative former attorney general who used his speech earlier to back amendments that would curb the power of ministers to pass secondary legislation under the bill (see 4pm), Baker said that ministers did want to address these concerns. He said that he was not in a position to propose concessions today, but that he was willing to have further meetings with a view to possible changes to the bill at report stage.

In an intervention Grieve said the government had to come back with “something that tempers the starkness of these powers”. But he said if ministers considered the issue in its entirety, it might be possible for them to come up with a solution.

In his interview on the Andrew Marr Show on Sunday (pdf) David Davis, the Brexit secretary, suggested that the UK might be able to sign a trade deal with with EU one minute, or even one second, after it leaves the EU at 11pm on 29 March 2019. It will not be able to sign one before then because it has to wait until it is a third country. But soon after that it will be able to sign the full caboodle (my word, not his), he argued.

Marr said it might not be possible to agree a trade deal within eight months. What would happen if the trade deal was not ready when the withdrawal deal was agreed, Marr asked. Davis replied:

I don’t agree. I mean it’s more like a year than 8 months in truth, but because bear in mind we can’t sign this until after March, until after we actually leave. Maybe one minute after we leave, or one second after we leave, but the formal technicalities we can’t do that. But we’ve got about a year and that was actually why this week was important.

When Michel Barnier was asked at the press conference if it would be possible to sign a trade deal on 30 March 2019, he said Davis was wrong. Barnier said:

David Davis, of course, has experience of European matters. We were ministers of European affairs at the same time ... he knows perfectly well what is possible and what is not possible. What we are dealing with in the negotiation is precisely the organisation of an orderly withdrawal, taking account of the future relationship.

In other words, by working seriously in a precise fashion without losing time, in October of next year, 2018, we can reach a treaty, a draft treaty which would then have to be ratified between October and March 2019, as at 29th March 2019, at midnight at 11pm UK time, the UK will become a third country. So we have less than a year to conclude an article 50 treaty. That will deal with the organisation of the orderly withdrawal, based henceforth on the joint report, an agreement on a possible transition period, and we will start negotiating the content of and framework for that as the council wishes as of February.

That will be the content of the treaty. I think that this treaty will be accompanied by a political declaration, and I dare say that is what David Davis is referring to, which will describe the framework for our future relationship. A political declaration. But it cannot be anything else. In technical, legal terms it simply is not possible to do anything else. And David Davis knows that full well.

So we will need more time, and that’s where the transition period could come in useful, to begin and conclude a negotiation on a free trade agreement. But we will need more time.

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Donald Tusk, the president of the European council, has released the text of his open letter to EU leaders ahead of the European council starting on Thursday. He covers Brexit, of course, but only in the final paragraph (as if to make the point that Brexit is not an all-consuming priority) for the EU. And he claims that getting a withdrawal deal by the autumn will involve “a furious race against time”. He says:

The EU and UK negotiators have prepared a joint report on what has been agreed so far, and I think we have a satisfactory result on most issues. For that reason, and based on the recommendation by our chief negotiator, I have tabled guidelines which will signal, if you agree, that we are ready to move to the second phase, which will expand discussions to cover transition and the framework for the future relationship. The conclusion of the first phase of negotiations is moderate progress, since we only have ten months left to determine the transition period and our future relations with the UK. This will be a furious race against time, where again our unity will be key. And the experience so far has shown that unity is a sine qua non of an orderly Brexit.

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Manfred Weber, the leader of the centre-right European People’s party (EPP) in the European parliament and an ally of Angela Merkel’s, has now used Twitter to say that David Davis’s comments on Sunday about the UK-EU Brexit deal being a “statement of intent” are “putting trust at risk”. Davis has retracted his comments, which he said were misunderstood, but EU leaders like Weber and Guy Verhofstadt (see 11.26am) are not letting him off lightly.

The press conference is now over. I missed the opening, but here are some lines people have been reporting on Twitter. These are from the Express’s Nick Gutteridge and MLex’s Matthew Holehouse.

Michel Barnier, the EU’s chief Brexit negotiator, is holding a press conference in Brussels.

Q: Do you accept David Davis’s claim that the EU could sign a trade deal minutes after the UK leaves the EU?

Barnier says he thinks the withdrawal agreement could be accompanied by a political declaration referring to the future trade relationship.

He says he thinks that is what Davis must have been referring to. That is all that will be possible, he says.

• Barnier says David Davis wrong about possibility of UK-EU trade deal being signed minutes after Brexit.

Q: There has been a lot of talk about a level playing field with a trade deal. What would that involve?

Barnier says he cannot say. The EU27 need to talk about that amongst themselves.

He says this trade deal will not be about convergence. It will be about managing divergence. It is the first time in 60 years a trade deal has had to do that, he says.

Grieve is now talking about other amendments.

He says the powers that the EU withdrawal bill gives to ministers are “far too stark and far too great”.

He says he wants to hear from ministers how they will respond to the various amendments that would constrain these powers.

For example, he says the government could accept his amendment 1, he says. This would limit the power of a minister to make regulations using powers under the bill “to cases where the EU law is deficient in the way set out in the bill”.

He says he wants to avoid having to put any of his amendments to a vote.

But he will only pull his amendments if he gets sufficient assurances from ministers, he says.

Dominic Grieve, the Conservative former attorney general, is speaking in the Commons now in the EU withdrawal bill debate. He has tabled many amendments to the bill, including one on which the government faces a real risk of defeat tomorrow.

He welcomes the government’s decision to accept amendments creating a “sifting committee” to ensure MPs get a vote when ministers want to introduce important bits of secondary legislation. But he says it will be important for the government to make sure that the right sort of MPs are sitting on that committee, he says. He says there are MPs in the chamber who are good at spotting when ministers are trying sneak through big changes with minimal scrutiny. They are the sorts of people who need to be on this committee, he says.

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