LONDON — Britain was all but cut off from the rest of Europe on Monday, with flights and trains banned by some 40 countries and freight deliveries halted at French ports, as its neighbors tried desperately to stop a fast-spreading variant of the coronavirus from leaping across the English Channel. The sudden disruption left Britain isolated and unnerved, its people stranded at airports or quarantined at home. It aroused fears of panic buying in British supermarkets, as a nation already rattled by a mysterious new strain of the virus now had to worry about running out of fresh food in the days before Christmas. It all added up to a chilling preview, a mere 10 days before the deadline to negotiate a post-Brexit trade agreement between Britain and the European Union, of what a chaotic rupture between the two sides might actually look like. For Prime Minister Boris Johnson, whose handling of the pandemic has been hampered by a reluctance to take tough measures followed by abrupt reversals in the face of alarming new evidence, the cascading events posed perhaps the gravest challenge yet to his ardently pro-Brexit government.

Source: New York Times December 21, 2020 17:30 UTC