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       The Enemy Gets a Vote

      It is lost to history whether Martin Selmayr was an admirer of General James ‘Mad Dog’ Mattis, the American general who was to become Donald Trump’s defence secretary, but he certainly understood one of Mattis’s favourite aphorisms about war – ‘the enemy gets a vote’. While the debate in cabinet and the British media was almost entirely consumed with what Britain wanted from a new deal with Brussels, senior Eurocrats had their own ideas and were beginning to flex their muscles. They didn’t come any more senior, or more aggressive, than Selmayr, the chief of staff to European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker.

      A German lawyer in his mid-forties, Selmayr was regarded – with good reason – as the most powerful man in Brussels. To some he was the most gifted protector of the European dream. To a generation of British diplomats he was a menace who regarded the UK as an obstruction to his schemes and had fully earned his nicknames, ‘the Rasputin of Brussels’ and ‘Monster of the Berlaymont’, the Commission’s headquarters. Said hardly ever to sleep, Selmayr harboured a peculiar animosity towards the British and their media, who had, in his words, a ‘foot on the brake of history’ – though Selmayr once claimed, ‘I only read the British press once a year, when I go to holiday in Spain, when one’s blood pressure is low.’ A ‘true believer’ in the European project, he was on record as saying, ‘Brexit cannot be a success,’ fearing that anything but a catastrophic Brexit could damage the European project. In early November he set out to make it so.

      On 4 November, the Financial Times – Selmayr’s preferred British outlet – ran a story saying that the European Union was to demand an exit bill of €60 billion from Britain. Ivan Rogers, Britain’s ambassador to the EU, warned London that Selmayr was trying to ‘explode the whole thing’ by making an impossible demand. A British diplomat said, ‘Selmayr enjoys lobbing grenades into the UK debate. Unlike other EU figures, he is skilled in dealing with the media.’

      The exact genesis of the Commission’s calculations was a mystery even to many in Brussels. Other member states told British officials that they had never seen the figure before and suggested it had been ‘plucked from the sky’ by Selmayr. Nonetheless there would be money to pay. Britain’s departure was hugely inconvenient for the other twenty-seven member states because it removed a net contributor to the EU budget that paid around 12 per cent of the bills, in 2016 a sum of around £9.5 billion. In 2013, the UK had signed up for the so-called Multi-annual Financial Framework (MFF) which dictated budget contributions through to 2020, a year after Brexit. Confronted by his opposite numbers about Britain ceasing to pay its dues, Rogers said, ‘They are not our dues because we will have left, so we do not have any financial liabilities at that point.’ EU officials told him, ‘You have exploded a bomb under the Multi-annual Financial Framework.’1 Countries in Eastern Europe which received EU structural funds would only get €88 for every €100 they had budgeted. The issue united countries that were net contributors and recipients. ‘One thing they can all agree on is that we are the rogues who have ceased to pay our dues,’ Rogers said.

      The second part of the bill was the UK’s share of the so-called reste à liquider: the gap, in European Union accounting jargon, between commitments made by member states and the actual payments handed over, a figure that had ballooned over the years and would be more than €200 billion by 2018. Britain was also expected to pay its share of the pensions for EU officials accrued during its membership and fees for initiatives like the Erasmus university scheme and the Horizon 2020 scientific research budget if it wished to remain part of those initiatives. On the other side of the ledger, Britain could argue that it owned a share of EU assets like its buildings and had around £9 billion invested in the European Investment Bank.

      If the money was a burden, it was also Theresa May’s best leverage in negotiating a new trade deal. Rogers told MPs, ‘The mere fact of our exiting during the period of the framework causes them immense financial difficulty.’2 His advice to May was, ‘Money will unlock a lot.’ But that stance – continuing to pay into the budget even after Brexit – was anathema to most Eurosceptics. It also put UKREP – the UK team in Brussels – at odds with officials in Whitehall, who took legal advice over whether Britain could be forced to pay anything. A House of Lords committee later concluded Britain could not be made to pay. To Rogers it was a matter of politics, not law.

      Selmayr had first clashed with May when she was home secretary and he could see that her tactics for Brexit were an echo of her negotiation when Britain opted out of all EU justice and home affairs directives and then back into some of them. EU officials believed the Brexit process was far more complicated and described May’s approach as ‘deluded’. Selmayr’s other beef with May was that he had personally spent hours thrashing out the details of concessions she had demanded as home secretary during David Cameron’s ill-fated renegotiation before the EU referendum. Having sweated to satisfy May, he was furious when she virtually sat out the campaign. A British diplomat said, ‘May was pushing to get extra things into the package but she never then made much of