Picardo travels to London for his first contact with the new British Foreign Minister with the agreement still pending

Gibraltar’s Chief Minister, Fabian Picardo, travelled to London on Tuesday to meet with Foreign Minister David Lammy, in what will be his first contact with the new British government while waiting for negotiations for the agreement with the EU to resume. Although Picardo has already spoken by phone with Lammy since the Labour Party won the elections on 4 July in the United Kingdom, this will be “the first official face-to-face contact” with the new head of the Foreign Office, the Gibraltar government has specified in a statement. The Chief Minister will be accompanied by the Deputy Chief Minister, Joseph García, as well as the Attorney General, Michael Llamas, at the meeting with the British minister. Lammy is in charge of negotiating on behalf of the British government with Brussels the agreement that will govern Gibraltar’s relationship with the EU after Brexit. The negotiation, which has continued at a technical level in recent months, was paralysed at a political level by the early elections in the United Kingdom. Now, the Minister of Foreign Affairs, European Union and Cooperation, José Manuel Albares, is expected to travel to London soon to meet with his counterpart and give a final boost before organising a meeting in Brussels with the Vice-President of the Commission in charge of the negotiation, Maros Sefcovic. After meeting with Lammy on the sidelines of the NATO summit in Washington in July, Albares announced that the negotiation would continue at the point where it had been left off and that there was a will on the part of both governments to close the agreement as soon as possible. Brussels hosted a second meeting on 16 May between Albares and the then British Foreign Minister, David Cameron, together with Sefcovic, which was also attended by Picardo, to try to close the agreement. Then, after six hours of meeting, it was reported that there had been “important progress and additional areas of agreement” and the parties noted that the agreement was “getting closer”.