EU leaders have warned Boris Johnson and Jeremy Hunt they will not renegotiate the withdrawal agreement with whoever becomes prime minister.

Speaking following a European Council meeting in Brussels, Donald Tusk said Brexit may become “even more exciting” if Johnson is in Downing Street but the deal will not change.

“Maybe the process of Brexit will be even more exciting than before because of some personnel decisions in London, but nothing has changed when it comes to our position,” he said yesterday.

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Johnson and Hunt will spend the next four weeks lobbying Conservative members for their votes, with both men claiming they will be able to renegotiate the Brexit agreement.

But Tusk said that during a discussion on the latest Brexit developments at a summit, the EU leaders were united in rejecting any further talks on the withdrawal agreement containing the Irish backstop.

Tusk’s words were echoed by German Chancellor Angela Merkel, Irish Taoiseach Leo Varadkar and Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte.

“We emphasised again that from our point of view the exit agreement has been finalised in negotiations but we will get back to this after the election of a new prime minister,” Merkel said.

Tusk, whose job is to chair the leaders’ summits, complained it was a political reality that the UK had been “wasting” the extra time granted.

He failed to deny that he had been thinking of Johnson earlier this year when he claimed Brexiteers without a plan deserved “a special place in hell”. “I think you understood what I thought using this metaphor,” he said.

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Varadkar said he hoped for an “early meeting” with the new prime minister, who is due to be chosen by the Tory membership in the last week of July.

He said: “I am conscious of the fact that notwithstanding their support for Brexit, their strong support of Brexit, both of the two people that are now going forward to the members of the British Conservative Party actually voted for the withdrawal agreement and they did so only a few weeks ago, and I think that is something worth bearing in mind.”

He added: “The absolute position of the EU is that the withdrawal agreement – including the backstop – is not going to be reopening. The political declaration can be reopened and reconsidered. But the most important thing for me is always when it comes to the backstop is achieving the objective and that is to have a legally binding and operable mechanism to give us the assurance that Brexit will not lead to the emergence of a hard border between North and South, whatever happens. And that’s what’s fundamentally important – achieving that objective.”

Rutte echoed the claims made by Varadkar on the first day of the summit that the EU was hostile to another Article 50 extension beyond the end of October, unless the UK Government’s red lines changed or a General Election or second referendum were called.

He said: “I believe on October 31 it ends, except if you have elections or a new referendum or you have a new prime minister going to Brussels saying, ‘I want to discuss the red lines,’ and then you could have a look at the political declaration. But, only in that case. We’re not going to renegotiate if nothing changes because that would go around in the same circles.”

May will take part in one final summit a week tomorrow when the EU’s leaders are gathering again in Brussels after failing to agree on candidates to replace Tusk and the European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker.

Other posts to fill in the coming weeks are presidents of the European Central Bank and the European Parliament, and the EU’s high representative for foreign affairs.