Perfectly timed to coincide with the third anniversary of Brexit, a nationwide survey shows a majority in every UK constituency bar three (curiously all in Lincolnshire) now think leaving the EU was an historic mistake.
As if to show Brexit supporters why that might be, the IMF announced that Britain would be the only major advanced economy to shrink in 2023, a performance even worse than that of Putin’s sanctions-hit Russia. Brexit it seems is more damaging than launching a senseless war on a peaceful neighbour.
Less noticed amidst the somewhat muted celebrations (what happened to the festival of Brexit by the way?) is a book revealing the story of the UK-EU negotiations as seen from behind the net curtains in Brussels. Inside the deal: How the EU got Brexit done, is by Stefaan De Rynck, an aide to the EU’s chief negotiator Michel Barnier.
De Rynck had a box seat for the entire Brexit farce, starring a motley cast of inept British cabinet ministers in laugh-a-minute performances that usually ranged between Johnny English and Mr Bean. Barnier deserves the Légion d’honneur for keeping a straight face most of the time.
Ambiguity in Lancaster House
Theresa May’s Lancaster House speech in January 2017 sets the scene for the whole debacle. The speech was ambiguous, De Rynck says, because May wanted “elements of the single market” in a bold, free trade agreement, but without clarity on how to square the circle between that and “taking back control”. She also wanted a “customs agreement” with the EU.
Looking around six years on, you can see UK politicians are still floundering in search of the same Holy Grail. It was, and still is, a fantasy.
The official British position from 2016 to the present day has been characterised by the complete lack of any clear consistent objectives, an unwillingness to face the reality of what the Brexit vote actually meant, sheer ignorance about how the EU functioned, and even a misunderstanding of what its purpose was.
Anyone who thinks that the present state of the UK-EU relationship was the one originally foreseen and intended by Brexiters should read De Rynck’s book. The sheer deviousness and effort that British ministers and diplomats and negotiators put in to try and retain all the single market benefits except freedom of movement, was incredible.
No clear position
In 2016, the EU moved quickly to develop their negotiating strategy and mandate. It took 27 member states with 24 official languages just a few months to do something we have failed to do for seven years – and Brexit was our idea!
Barnier and his team visited member state capitals, and held regular meetings with ambassadors to the EU and with the European parliament. The result was the first negotiating mandate. Just nine pages, published on 29 April 2017, it locked the 27 member states together in a completely unified position.
Just before trade talks started, at the end of February 2020, a second mandate was published defining the EU’s precise position on a new partnership agreement. Barnier managed to do all this with a tiny team of 12 officials at the outset, rising to 60 at the end, although they of course had access to the entire EU Commission. In contrast, the UK Department for Exiting the EU (DExEU) employed nearly 700 civil servants.
Every visitor Barnier received from the UK, and there were lots (cabinet ministers, MPs, the devolved administrations…), came with their own disparate ideas and agendas. In hindsight it looks totally ridiculous, although in Brexit terms that’s hardly unusual.
Britain never managed to find any common ground with itself. All Barnier could do was to explain that negotiations could only be carried out with the British government.
Germany will ride to our rescue
Angela Merkel, the German chancellor was “generally flabbergasted by the UK’s decision to leave the EU” and told May at their very first meeting in July 2016 that Germany’s “priority was to protect the integrity of the single market”.
Despite this, May, David Davis and the rest of the Conservative Party both in and out of government, continued (and probably still continue) to think the German government, its car companies or other member states, would somehow step in to rewrite Barnier’s mandate from the EU27 and force the EU Commission to help the UK.
It was a total misunderstanding of the power dynamics inside the EU institutions.
Theresa May
May took on the task of finding a way through the Brexit thicket. She was not well served by her controversial advisers Nick Timothy and Fiona Hill, who were both forced to resign after the disastrous 2017 election.
Advisers on the EU with real expertise like Sir Ivan Rogers were forced out or sidelined, to be replaced by seemingly clueless amateurs.
According to a review of the book by former Labour MP Denis MacShane, at one point May visited Lars Løkke Rasmussen, the Danish PM, and sat opposite him without saying a word for some minutes. Finally, he tried to help her: “Tell me Theresa, what do you actually want from the EU?”
She fired cryptically back at the Anglophile Rasmussen: “Read my speeches.” The Danish ambassador in the UK who was present at the time told MacShane that his boss had no idea of how to handle May. “She is the oddest person I have ever dealt with in Europe”, he confided in his ambassador later.
The story captures Britain’s approach to Brexit perfectly. All we had to do was keep shouting louder and eventually a European waiter would deliver what we wanted.
Boris Johnson
In early October 2019, Boris Johnson was fast running out of time. His back was against the wall he had built himself and he needed a face-saving way out.
After the ‘breakthrough’ (Johnson capitulated) with Leo Varadkar in Chester on Thursday 10 October 2019, teams from the two sides intensively set to work to flesh out the details. By the following Wednesday, a day before a crucial EU Council meeting, basically everything had been buttoned up. There would be a border in the Irish Sea.
But the next morning (17 October) at around 9am CET, just hours before the EU Council meeting where the withdrawal agreement was to be discussed and accepted by the assembled EU27 leaders, Johnson called Jean Claude Juncker, president of the EU Commission, and had one final request.
According to De Rynck, Johnson “tried to get an exemption for ‘West-East declarations’ as he called them, the customs exit declarations for goods leaving the EU that apply from Northern Ireland to Great Britain”, urging Juncker, who was surrounded by colleagues at the time, to drop the checks altogether, presumably fearing the DUP’s reaction would be the same as May had experienced in the most humiliating possible way two years before.
“That was impossible”, Juncker told him, a cigarette in one hand and the phone in the other. “They are part of the Union’s custom code and your negotiators agreed the code applies in full to Northern Ireland.”
Johnson hung up, took two hours to reflect on his options, and accepted the terms of the deal in a second call that morning to Juncker at around 11am.
Despite this, a few days later, on 9 November, the PM told a group of businessmen in Belfast they could put customs declaration forms “in the bin” because there will be “no barriers of any kind” to trade crossing the Irish Sea. On 8 December, interviewed by Sophy Ridge on Sky TV, he informed millions of British TV viewers there would be no checks “both ways”. Everybody else was wrong and he alone was right.
This wasn’t a mistake or a misunderstanding. He had explicitly asked the top official in the EU Commission and been told it was not possible. He knew he was telling a great big porky.
Dominic Raab
There were occasions when ministers in London were saying one thing while British negotiators in Brussels were working on another. At one point under Prime Minister May, Dominic Raab, the then Brexit secretary, appeared like Malcolm Tucker. He travelled all the way to Brussels to inform Barnier that he would “block any idea that postponed the introduction of an independent UK trade policy as part of the backstop and disassociated himself from what Barnier had worked on for days at the instigation of May’s team” [our emphasis].
He went on to tell Barnier that “as a cabinet member he had to protect the prime minister” and therefore “he disagreed with what she was trying to do”.
De Rynck seemed exasperated by it all, because as he explains, “Barnier himself had just spent days cajoling several people in the EU to move towards what May wanted, while May attempted to bypass him in EU capitals”.
You couldn’t make this stuff up.
Phillip Hammond
The then chancellor Phillip Hammond went breezily around Europe testing out the possibility of a Norway-style relationship with EU interlocutors, in Brussels, at dinner with MEPs such as Guy Verhofstadt and with national governments.
He wanted “near full single market participation and asked the EU to share its powers on granting equivalences for financial services to UK supervisors and regulators”.
On another occasion, Hammond was discussing migration and said he thought a solution could be found to the mobility issue for specific categories of people. He asked, “What does that buy?” as if he was haggling in an Arab souk, trading sectors of the single market in exchange for new and unique migration arrangements.
If you aren’t embarrassed by that you should be.
Duplicity, ignorance and incompetence
Suffice to say that nobody on the British side comes across well. There are only varying levels of duplicity, ignorance and incompetence, but we already knew that.
Even Hilary Benn’s committee on exiting the EU doesn’t escape. On one visit it appeared to Barnier’s team that their questions were coming “from a different galaxy”.
Seema Malhotra MP, asked if the UK could have a sector-by-sector relationship akin to the Ukraine model, which the EU had repeatedly rejected in view of May’s red lines. Craig Mackinlay MP, promoted a trust-based model for a generalised mutual recognition of standards. Benn asked why some divergence was a problem as the UK would still be more in alignment to the EU than any other country.
Barnier’s answers can best be summed up like Margaret Thatcher’s to Jacque Delors’ proposals for more European integration in 1990, as “no, no, no!”
Starmer and Corbyn met with Barnier several times when Starmer was shadow Europe minister. On one occasion, De Rynck notes: “Starmer thought that some tinkering with free movement of EU nationals was possible without giving up single market membership.” He was quickly informed that “You cannot have 3.5 freedoms,” referring to the EU’s “uncompromising position on the 4 freedoms of movement – of goods, of capital, of professional services and of citizens – that Margaret Thatcher fought so hard to obtain in the 1980s.”
The alternative arrangements commission
The alternative arrangements commission (AAC) was a committee set up by May to examine magical solutions for an invisible Irish border, known as the Malthouse compromise, or in Brussels circles as the madhouse compromise.
When in 2018 we put forward a three-page summary of a ‘maximum facilitation’ proposal for the Irish land border which was said to be of “bewildering complexity” it was shown to Robert Lighthizer, Donald Trump’s trade supremo, who was vastly experienced in the WTO. Having read it and concluded it made no sense, he asked Michel Barnier, “How do you deal with these people?”
How indeed.
In August, Suella Braverman visited Barnier’s team with a delegation to present the final report of the AAC, adopted just before Johnson became PM. Shanker Singham, a think tanker and co-author of the report, admitted at the meeting that checks on the island were inevitable if Northern Ireland did not stay in the EU’s customs union and single market for goods.
Braverman surprised Barnier when she said the proposed ideas probably wouldn’t gather majority support in the House of Commons anyway and since they couldn’t provide any legal guarantees for an operative solution, it simply confirmed to the EU side that all of this was unworkable, at least in the short term.
It was in other words a complete waste of time.
The conclusion
May’s failed attempt was characterised by the lack of any clear objectives. Johnson on the other hand had an objective (to get Brexit done at any cost) but went at it like a bull at a gate, especially in Northern Ireland.
It’s hard to disagree with De Rynck that David (now Lord) Frost’s procrastination and confrontational approach of contesting all EU demands, “blocked a more dynamic process of searching for common ground”.
The UK played a game of chicken, by itself, De Rynck says, a tactic that was “rooted in its erroneous assessment of the negotiation as a game of nerves”.
This approach mostly worked out to the EU’s benefit, but the “take-it-or-leave-it situation into which the UK cornered itself in October 2019, and again in December 2020, contributed to subsequent implementation problems, for the moment in Northern Ireland, in the future, perhaps on the level playing field”.
Instead of the chimera beloved of Brexiters that EU capitals usually succumb to the tough line of the commission, and in turn give it too much freedom, the truth, says De Rynck, is that Barnier and his experts were often better friends of the UK than the member states. They had the technical expertise of the commission at their disposal, able to find creative ways to forge compromises and contain the Brexit damage for the EU.
It was and is a fundamental misunderstanding of what the EU is and how its institutions work in terms of the power balance between the National and European levels.
As support for Brexit tumbles and politicians and commentators talk of a “closer relationship” with the EU, they would do well to read this book. It may be very useful in the coming years.
Inside the Deal: How the EU got Brexit done – Stefaan De Rynck. Agenda Publishing 2023, ISBN: 9781788215688
