A couple of years ago, Michel Barnier spent a weekend with Boris Johnson’s father, Stanley. It was not some ghoulish Brexit spin-off of The Traitors, but the result of the former EU negotiator’s wife, Isabelle, being a close friend of Johnson’s French cousin, Anne du Boucheron, the owner of Château de la Baronnière, a 19th-century estate in Mauges-sur-Loire, in western France.
“We spent a weekend together in a French castle. Very friendly. Long promenades in the forest,” Barnier recalls of Johnson senior, with whom he discussed the former prime minister’s motivation to back Brexit. “It was interesting. Boris was much more European at the beginning. Even if he was critical. I don’t see it as a motivation but it is, perhaps, a method or attitude: to be pragmatic in some way. Cynical. Cynical to get power.”
Emphasising his points with a gentle thump of the table in a splendid meeting room in the National Assembly, where he now represents a Paris constituency, Barnier follows up his anecdote with fresh evidence of his fondness for a bon mot . To “the clock is ticking”, “no spirit of revenge”, “no cherrypicking”, add: “Never sacrifice the future to the present.”
A decade ago, Barnier was asked by the then European Commission president, Jean-Claude Juncker, to lead the EU’s negotiating team after the Brexit referendum. He navigated four years of fraught talks, a list of negotiating counterparts lengthy enough to grace a pub quiz question – David Davis, Dominic Raab, Steve Barclay, David Frost, for the uninitiated – and a stream of meetings in his offices on the fifth floor of the EU’s Berlaymont headquarters in Brussels with the various political agitators of the time.
Michel Barnier served as the EU’s chief Brexit negotiator and twice as a European commissioner. Photograph: Magali Delporte/The Guardian There was Tony Blair (“I never thought that there would be a second referendum,” Barnier insists) and Nigel Farage (“This guy with the help of Mr [Steve] Bannon, the help of the Russians wants to destroy the EU – never, no way”). He also hosted that “more radical group” in the Conservative party, he recalls, grasping for the name of the guerrilla Brexiters who made such trouble for Theresa May.
“The ERG [European Research Group], yes,” he says after a little help. “Great times,” says Barnier with a wistful smile. Each to their own, perhaps. Few would now argue that great times followed Britain’s exit of the EU – something Barnier is happy to make a point of.
“The great lie was to say that everything was due to Brussels,” he says, noting the UK’s weak economic growth and increasingly toxic immigration debate. “Mr Farage is still winning some elections but he has no longer the capacity to say the fault is in Brussels.”
Other scapegoats are available? “But not Brussels,” he responds with a little flash of steel. “It would not be fair to say that the problems of the UK today are due to Brexit , but what I am sure of is that all these problems are more difficult because of Brexit.”
Left to right: Boris Johnson, Ursula von der Leyen, David Frost and Michel Barnier in Brussels for post-Brexit trade talks in 2020. Photograph: Etienne Ansotte/European Commission/PA It is not that Barnier is blind to the EU’s historical “mistakes”, he says. Too many directives and bureaucracy, he concedes, and not enough done to secure the bloc’s external borders. He is an admirer of the EU’s new policy of seven-day screenings for those arriving through irregular routes and expedited deportations, a package of policies that have had some making comparisons to Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown.
All this should have been done earlier, he says, but Britain was as complicit in this failure as the other 27 member states. “I still don’t understand why the UK, which always had a very strong influence, left rather than use its influence to correct the EU – it is for me incomprehensible.”
Barnier is also reluctant to accept that the EU made any particular missteps in the run-up to the referendum in 2016. It was Britain’s decision not to impose transitional controls on migration from eastern Europe when Poland (2004), Bulgaria and Romania (2007) joined the EU.
The then German chancellor Angela Merkel’s later rejection of David Cameron’s “emergency brake” was soundly based on concerns about the “unravelling of the unity and coherence of the EU and legitimacy of the single market”, he says.
The single market was the top priority for Barnier too during the Brexit talks as the UK sought to keep frictionless trade while ending the free movement of people. At the time, Barnier explained it in a rather technical way; that the four freedoms (of goods, capital, services and labour) were indivisible. Today, he is more political.
Barnier, not yet a presidential candidate for when Emmanuel Macron stands down, but doing a lot of campaigning and “hoping to be useful”, is speaking in the knowledge of a very real possibility that a far-right president could be…
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