British officials have wargamed pulling out of the Horizon Europe programme in case France carries out its threat to block the UK’s associate membership of the 100bn programme over the Brexit fishing row.

       Contingency plans have been drawn up to support research by UK universities and companies if the government decides to quit the €10bn flagship programme rather than wait, the Telegraph can reveal.

       The UK agreed to continue participating in the Horizon research programme after Brexit because it was seen as a profitable enterprise for the country’s scientists and universities.

       “We have alternative plans in place to support the sector in case they continue down this path”,” a source said before warning, “repeated delays calls into question the worth of us contributing at all.”

       Paris has threatened to block the finalising of the membership of Horizon, which the UK pays ￡15bn as part of a settlement reached in the Brexit negotiations.

       Deal previously delayed over Northern Ireland Protocol

       Officials pointed to the UK’s success in earlier versions of the programme and its pool of world class universities as researchers as reasons to be bullish about Britain outside the programme.

       The programme’s predecessor, Horizon 2020, involved more than 100 countries around the world and provided about 11 per cent of research funding to UK universities.

       The rubberstamping of the deal, which was meant to happen in June, has already been delayed by tensions over the Northern Ireland Protocol.

       British companies and Universities can still pitch for projects in the meantime but membership will have to be finalised before grants can be paid out.

       Macron sets deadline over fishing licenses

       Emmanuel Macron, the French president, has set a two-week deadline for the UK and Jersey to back down in the row over licences.

       Paris is furious that the UK approved just 15 permits out of 47 applications for small French fishing boats to operate in its coastal waters.

       EU and UK officials have been locked in "boat-by-boat" discussions in an attempt to establish whether the rejected French vessels are entitled to operate in Britain's coastal waters.

       Sources in the European Commission, which is negotiating on behalf of the bloc, have voiced frustrations with France’s hard line approach.

       One official said Brussels was attempting to be the “honest broker” in the middle of Boris Johnson and Emmanuel Macron’s political stunts, aimed at their domestic voters.

       The source suggested that the Commission was aware that some of the French applications could be bogus, with fishermen attempting to secure access to a coveted expanse of water off Britain’s coast.

       The Brussels-based executive hopes that it has managed to filter out many of the fraudulent applications before they were sent to the British authorities for a final decision.

       But at the end of the day, EU officials believe the row will eventually peter out after Paris is given a firm answer on why its boats were rejected.

       The French government has planned a series of national measures it could take against the UK.

       These could include go-slow customs checks at Calais, UK ships being turned away from French ports, and stalling on bilateral cooperation with Britain.

       France has said it could announce potential sanctions over energy prices and trade "by the end of the week".

       "We are obviously in a position to take sanctions if the agreement is not respected," French government spokesperson Gabriel Attal said on Wednesday.

       "There are several types of sanctions that are possible: energy prices, access to (French) ports, tariffs issues."

       Mr Attal said the sanctions would take effect in November if no deal is reached with the U.K. and Jersey.

       Pascal Delacour, the first French fisherman to receive a Jersey licence, said France had "played a bad hand by asking for too many licences".

       "There was even a boat from Bayonne (on the southwestern Basque coast) that had never set foot here," he said. The French government has been incapable of defending the interests of fishermen who continue to go out every day".

       "Nothing is clear and the government hasn't even been capable of tasking a civil servant to come and translate incomprehensible English documents that Jersey sends us. Because I'm a fisherman, not an Oxford graduate."