Fall Out: A Year of Political Mayhem. Tim Shipman
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stop Juncker getting the presidency of the European Commission and his aides had spread stories – apparently accurate – about the former Luxembourg prime minister drinking brandy for breakfast. ‘I’ve been to four or five things when he has been shitfaced,’ one official said. ‘Off his trolley, hugging and kissing people.’ Rogers’ advice to May was that she would have to find a way to ‘go around Selmayr’ to do business with Juncker directly. ‘Before he became a total pisshead he was a very sinuous, agile, clever, schmoozing politician,’ a senior official said. ‘Even now there are flashes through the alcoholic haze where you think, “This guy’s got a very considerable brain.”’ The problem was that Juncker’s knowledge of Britain was twenty years out of date. Recognising that he was ‘a total address book politician’, one diplomat asked Juncker, ‘Who do you know in British politics?’ Juncker replied, ‘There’s John Major, who I got along well with in the past, Ken Clarke, Peter Bottomley.’ As a roster of out-of-touch Europhiles with no skin in the new game it was hard to top. Hearing this, Rogers had sought to impress on London that someone should tell Juncker the home truths about political reality in Britain. ‘You need people who can be private channels,’ Rogers said. ‘That’s how the game works and every other European power does it.’
Dinner with Jean-Claude Juncker would have to wait but efforts to get May to bond with EU power brokers were made, to the bewilderment of some of them. Donald Tusk, the president of the European Council – the body of member state governments – was ushered in for a series of private chats and faced the same fate as many an MP and journalist. ‘There were Pinteresque pauses in all their bilaterals,’ an official said. Tusk complained, ‘She doesn’t say anything!’ and was told, ‘That’s not her style. Don’t take it personally.’ Martin Schulz, the president of the European Parliament, was invited to Downing Street in late September 2016. After his meeting with May, he texted a senior British diplomat to complain, ‘She didn’t say anything at all. Why have we come all the way to Downing St for that?’
These meetings raised questions about whether May would be able to do the human end of the negotiations, the ‘walk in the woods’ with fellow leaders that helped get a deal over the line. A Downing Street aide said May’s silences were partly a function of insecurity. ‘When you give her a brief to learn, she’s brilliant, but she doesn’t want to reveal what she doesn’t know so she won’t say anything.’ A senior European government official described May as ‘almost reciting from her notes’.3 At the European Council meeting in Brussels that December, May appeared isolated as television footage showed other leaders greeting each other warmly while she stood awkwardly to the side. She was quickly branded ‘Billy no mates’ on social media.
The Commission was regarded in Britain as a rather ridiculous organisation. It took Rogers to point out, ‘They are really pretty good at negotiating against people. Lots of people who have been doing it for thirty years. They have vastly more information at their disposal about where the twenty-seven are coming from than we do, because they are talking to all these people all the time.’4 He urged Jeremy Heywood to appoint a slate of a dozen negotiators under Oliver Robbins to lead on individual issues because he could not get across all the detail himself. The plan was rejected. Robbins would be up against Michel Barnier’s deputy Sabine Weyand, a ‘very smart’ German with three decades of trade negotiations behind her, and Didier Seeuws, a former chef de cabinet to Herman van Rompuy, the former Council president. Robbins would need to know everything from customs procedures to the life cycle of pelagic fish.
David Davis regarded the Commission as a smaller version of the Treasury – a group of people with a belief in the European project who were caught up in a ‘cauldron of emotions’ by Britain’s vote to leave. He believed that they would be ‘brought back to reality’ by the governments of the individual member states. Throughout the summer and autumn Davis travelled Europe meeting fellow ministers and special interest groups, trying to work out who might have interests that would align with Britain’s. The first thing he and David Jones, another of his Brexit ministers, found in their travels was that the rest of Europe was still traumatised by Britain’s decision to leave. Many could not comprehend that Brexit would even happen, so used were they to EU governments holding repeat referendums until they got the result they wanted. Another cabinet minister said, ‘Their initial reaction was one of extreme disappointment, charged with irritation that they were now going to go through a traumatic process which is of our making.’ Another minister estimated, ‘It took about three or four months before EU ministers came to terms with the fact that we were actually leaving.’ At a general affairs council meeting in Bratislava, David Jones was introduced to the Commission’s vice president, Frans Timmermans, whose first words betrayed his angst: ‘Well, how long do you intend to remain shackled to this corpse?’
In a bid to curry favour, ministers found themselves procuring tickets for a Liverpool football game for one senior EU politician. Davis also considered roping in Aston Martin ‘in the national interest’ to give Guy Verhofstadt a spin in one of their cars. The Belgian MEP, who was the European Parliament’s point man on Brexit, raced vintage sports cars. Davis needed all the tricks of the trade ahead of his first meeting with Verhofstadt on 22 November. When asked about the Belgian in Parliament two months earlier, the Brexit secretary had quoted the biblical line, ‘Get thee behind me Satan’. Davis meant he would not be tempted to comment, but the media wrote that he had called Verhofstadt the Devil. When they met, Verhofstadt entered into the spirit of things, greeting Davis with the words, ‘Welcome to hell.’ The talks were not quite that bad, but at their conclusion Verhofstadt’s MEP colleague Manfred Weber said, ‘I have not heard much as to how the British government wants to tackle Brexit and what Brexit really means.’ Verhofstadt was regarded in Downing Street as a voluble nuisance, but his role was important since the European Parliament would have to rubber-stamp a future trade deal. Davis had identified him as one of thirty key interlocutors – one in each of the twenty-seven countries, plus the Commission, the Council and the Parliament. He believed he needed to meet each of them three times in order to develop a relationship of trust.
In order to facilitate all this travel, Davis demanded the use of the prime minister’s official aircraft, dubbed TheresaJet by Westminster journalists, and the Queen’s Flight of the Royal Air Force, which is also used by ministers. ‘DD felt he was the “real” foreign secretary and so therefore thought he should be allowed to use the prime minister’s plane and to catch a royal flight,’ a DExEU official recalled. The request led to ‘an enormous battle’. Michael Fallon, the defence secretary, gave the green light but Simon Case – May’s principal private secretary at Number 10 – and Oliver Robbins, who regularly flew EasyJet, both resisted. ‘Olly totally disapproved and kept blocking the plane,’ the official said. ‘He didn’t really see why DD should be whisked by private jet across Europe.’ Davis won the day when he told Fiona Hill he would not do the trips unless he got his way.
The most important relationship for Davis to develop was that with Michel Barnier, the French former commissioner for financial services who had been appointed as the lead negotiator for the Commission. Barnier was, in Davis’s words, ‘very French’, a smooth and debonair character – in contrast with Davis, who sported the twisted nose of a boxer with more bravery than ability. The two had known each other since the days when they were both Europe ministers in the 1990s. Now they were friendly adversaries. Officials hoped Barnier would take a more pragmatic approach than Martin Selmayr. ‘Barnier is a vain, hopeless and tedious individual but he’s not as vicious as he’s made out to be,’ one undiplomatic diplomat said. ‘He actually wants to do a deal.’ Davis was similarly encouraged by a belief that Barnier wished to become European Union president when Juncker stood down in 2019 – perfect timing for Barnier if he could land a deal with Britain that spring.
Barnier’s hands were tied by the negotiating mandate he had been given by the member states. In their first substantive conversation, Barnier repeated the mantra, ‘no negotiation without notification’, and told Davis Britain’s demand that the divorce arrangements be negotiated alongside the new trade deal was a non-starter. The EU wanted the exit bill settled first, along with a solution to the Irish border and the thorny issue of citizens’