European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker and British Prime Minister Theresa May in Brussels | Olivier Hoslet/EPA

EU’s Juncker tells UK ‘we are ready’ to start Brexit talks

Negotiations are due to start this month towards a March 2019 deadline for Britain leaving the EU.

PRAGUE — European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker told Britain on Friday the EU was ready to commence Brexit talks and he hoped the U.K. would be able to form a government as soon as possible.

"We are ready to start negotiations,” Juncker told POLITICO on the sidelines at a conference in Prague. "I hope that the British will be able to form as soon as possible a stable government. I don’t think that things now have become easier but we are ready.”

Juncker's comments reflect consensus among EU leaders that the best way to restore stability is to get the Brexit talks under way quickly and work towards the March 2019 deadline for Britain to leave the European Union.

There is also a hint of Schadenfreude about the fate of Prime Minister Theresa May's Conservatives, who put themselves in this dilemma by calling a referendum on membership of the EU in the first place. The Tories lost their majority in Thursday's snap elections, which May had called in a bid to strengthen her mandate.

Separately, the EU's chief Brexit negotiator Michel Barnier said the talks should only begin when the country is ready, pushing back against some senior European politicians who want to stick to the current timetable, under which talks with the U.K. are due to begin this month.

"#Brexit negotiations should start when UK is ready; timetable and EU positions are clear," tweeted Barnier. "Let's put our minds together on striking a deal."

Senior officials in Brussels had welcomed May's decision in April to call the elections, in the hope that it would bring clarity and predictability to the Brexit talks and give her the political strength to make decisions that might be unpopular at home. However, May's gamble went disastrously wrong.

"The clock is running for #Brexit," tweeted Manfred Weber, the German MEP who leads the largest bloc in the European Parliament, the center-right European People's Party. "That means the U.K. urgently needs a government that can negotiate. The date of the start of negotiations is uncertain now."

In a sign of evident denial still gripping May's government, a senior British official telephoned Juncker's chief-of-staff, Martin Selmayr, on Friday morning and suggested that London and Brussels would be able to stick with the expected timetable for the Brexit talks. That assertion left EU officials rolling their eyes.

"We don't know when Brexit talks start. We know when they must end," tweeted Donald Tusk, president of the European Council.

Pierre Moscovici, European commissioner for economic and financial affairs, said on French radio that although the U.K. elections “were not about a new Brexit referendum,” the results would certainly have “impact on the spirit of the negotiations." However, the Brexit talks would have to go ahead and the Commission would stick to the March 2019 deadline for Britain leaving the EU, he said.

French Prime Minister Edouard Philippe told French radio that he now expected the Brexit talks to be "be long and complicated, we should not fool ourselves.”

That was also the view of Günther Oettinger, the EU's German budget commissioner, who said "mistakes were made" in May's campaign but denied that he was enjoying the spectacle. "Schadenfreude? No, why? Leaving aside that this is a disaster for the Tories and that no one knows what comes next, we need a functioning government that can negotiate Great Britain's exit," he told German radio.

"The referendum still stands. No one is questioning it. The British will push ahead with the negotiations but with a weakened negotiating partner there's a danger that the talks don't go well for either side."

Matthew Karnitschnig contributed to this article.