Like Homer Simpson shuffling surreptitiously backwards into a hedge, some would have us believe that Brexit is gradually fading into the background. Not, it’s true, for the businesses dealing with the fallout, or for the people of Northern Ireland. But Covid has shifted the dial politically. Governments are currently defined by their response to the pandemic here, across the EU and elsewhere.
This is not, perhaps, the most promising backdrop to the launch of the diaries from the EU’s chief negotiator Michel Barnier, covering the four long years that he spent grinding away at the problem. But La grande illusion: Journal secret du Brexit (2016-2020) was published by Gallimard in French in May, with an English translation due in the autumn. So who and what is this book for?
Historians, I guess, in the years to come. They will find the key steps of the process set out in detail with a helpful timeline. If, like some—and certainly those of us who sat in the European Commission—you’ve been living this process for the last few years, you won’t discover much new. It’s not clear how “secret” these diaries are: everyone knew Barnier was keeping them and he doesn’t have a trove of previously classified information to reveal. But they do give a blow-by-blow account of what he was doing, saying and thinking at the heart of the negotiations.
In print, as in life, Barnier is uncommonly straightforward for someone who has spent decades in frontline political roles. What you see is what you get, or in this case what you get to read. I have always thought that one of Barnier’s strengths was his consistency. Some saw this as a lack of flexibility or imagination, but it had the benefit of building credibility.
He quotes Churchill’s diaries from between the wars. While I don’t believe that Barnier pretends to anything like equivalent literary merit, he clearly does have a sense of the importance of setting out his version of events, not just for framing the last struggle but for setting out on the next. Because he is, of course, launching his campaign to contest next year’s French presidential elections. And French politicians write books. Some, like Alain Juppé, with real flourish; some to demonstrate their cultural sophistication; pretty much all as a platform for their campaign. The French will still queue to attend a politician’s book signing.
So much for motivation. What do readers get from this book? It’s an honest account of what the pro-European, Franco-German, centrist, Christian democratic weight of opinion in the EU thought about Brexit. And of the way this perspective defined the process, while the UK was still trying to work out what it thought. The diaries chronicle a litany of misunderstandings, miscommunication and missed opportunities.
Early on, Barnier gives a characteristically thorough account of setting up his new office in the Berlaymont building, the Commission HQ. He describes the photographs and memorabilia relating to his role helping to run the 1992 Albertville Winter Olympics, his big political breakthrough in his native Savoie; his European credentials, two times commissioner, four times minister; an audience with the Pope. His Catholicism is worn lightly, but it is there in the background. We’re missing a picture of de Gaulle, but this lifelong Gaullist makes up for it by quoting his hero liberally.
We’re also reminded early on that this wasn’t the Berlaymont office Barnier had set his sights on. He wanted to be Commission president but lost out to Jean-Claude Juncker, who, once faced with Brexit, chose his old friend—and sometime rival—as a safe pair of hands for the negotiations. It’s not true that Juncker didn’t “do Brexit”; he played a crucial role, as the diaries show, for example in supporting the proposed deal with Theresa May. But he didn’t want to talk about it all the time. Barnier was always happy to talk Brexit.
We learn more about Barnier’s mental furniture. He is profoundly committed to Europe because, for him, it is at heart a peace project. He cites Norman Angell arguing that war is a weakness, where all the protagonists, victors or vanquished, are losers. He cites (as a riposte to former Brexit secretary Stephen Barclay, and implicitly the UK’s most recent lead negotiator David Frost) de Gaulle’s commitment in 1958 to implementing the Treaty of Rome. He quotes his mentors Chirac and Sarkozy, but also presidents Hollande and Macron, and their German opposite numbers defending Europe—some more enthusiastically than others. He praises the central European enlargement, not a given for a French politician.
It follows that Brexit is a turning away from this European project and—Barnier makes no bones about this—in his view a mistake. He seeks to put it in some kind of, basically Gaullist, context: “Angleterre” was always different, an island apart. He quotes the late Europhile Guardian journalist Hugo Young, one of our former commissioners Chris Patten, and the director of Chatham House think tank Robin Niblett, on the UK’s sense of separateness and its detached “destiny.” For all this, he sees Brexit as an illusion. The decision to leave was a moment of madness, worthy of Lear, sold by politicians who were then not ready to take responsibility for their actions.
Taking responsibility is a great Barnier theme. Unlike many leading French politicians, he didn’t go to the École nationale d’administration, the elite finishing school where future bureaucrats learn to draft and present legislation. He went instead to the École supérieure de commerce de Paris, a business school, and later argued that you can’t solve problems simply with drafting, and that policies should be judged by implementation. Which might explain, in part, why he reacted so strongly to some of the advocates of Brexit. Time and again, Barnier fumes about the British classe politique not understanding the complex consequences of decisions taken in and after the referendum, a failure that he says led to the Europeans turning off. Those on the UK side for whom he admits some respect—May, and her Europe negotiator Olly Robbins—are credited with at least coming to understand the consequences of Brexit.
During the talks, Barnier consistently underlined the importance of EU unity. This wasn’t a secret weapon unveiled with a flourish to thwart the Brits; as the diaries set out, it required hard work. Partly motivated by the fear that populists on the continent would jump on the Brexit bandwagon, Barnier criss-crossed Europe on a weekly basis, no doubt enjoying meeting presidents and prime ministers, but more importantly building the links that sustained him through the negotiations. Barnier understood from the outset the iron rule that you must, as a negotiator, secure your own camp, and he kept the 27 other member states together. Some in the UK imagined that winning concessions would involve a tug of love for the affections of European capitals: the real negotiations, they suggested, would be with Macron and especially Angela Merkel. But for May such an approach was a distraction.
What she needed was support in Westminster. She tried, unsuccessfully, to strengthen her standing in the 2017 elections. After that, too many on her own benches undermined what she was trying to do. The shock of her record-breaking loss in January 2019 in the first “meaningful vote” on her deal, substantially repeated in the March vote, rings through Barnier’s diaries. After the shared effort to reach an agreement, the votes in parliament shredded May’s credibility and a good deal of the residual trust between the UK and EU negotiating teams.
Back in Brussels, Barnier’s obsession with transparency and providing a running commentary on discussions did little for progress. For him, it was a tried-and-tested technique: he’d used public presentations and “slides” as internal market commissioner to win support for financial services regulation. It played to his character—and ego—to explain pedagogically why the other side was wrong. The diaries reproduce some of his well-known slides, like the famous “staircase” of options, with EU membership at the top and a loose relationship like Canada’s at the bottom. But we also read how he rehearsed press conference lines, as when Boris Johnson as foreign secretary said the EU could “go whistle” and Barnier had a ready-made riposte: “I’m not hearing any whistling. Just the clock ticking.” (I guess you had to be there.) All this raised his profile, but it didn’t help negotiations. One can sense from some of the gaps and jumps in the diaries, for example when Barnier goes from completely opposing the “all-UK backstop” for Northern Ireland to endorsing it, that some of the more significant agreements between the two negotiating teams were reached when he was on the road.
Barnier’s obsession with providing a running commentary on discussions did little for progress
What of the substance of the negotiations? For Barnier, and behind him the EU, it’s a damage-limitation exercise, start to finish. The two sides end up talking past each other: the EU thinking HMG wants to “cheat”; the UK thinking the EU wants to “tie its hands.” There’s much that is familiar from the coverage at the time, but for me three lessons stand out from what’s said, and sometimes not said, in the diaries.
First, and I think this holds for most—at least successful—negotiations, that it’s worth making an effort to build some understanding with your negotiating partners, however much you might disagree with them. There’s little evidence that Barnier got very far with this. He writes May a respectful letter when she resigns, but fundamentally believes what she’s trying to do is a mistake. Some of those on the UK side have described an almost careless default setting of humiliating the UK: think of those pictures of May waiting outside as Barnier briefed the European Council about the UK parliament. He notes when Johnson became PM that one shouldn’t underestimate him; he believes Johnson needs a deal to get Brexit done. And so it proved, but what little confidence existed was later blown up by the threat last year to renege on the Northern Ireland protocol in the Internal Market Bill, which is a “betrayal” by a No 10 “not up to the task.”
Second, it can sometimes be an error to overachieve your objectives. The EU overachieved on Northern Ireland in the eventual deal, and Barnier was central, as the diaries make clear. He felt he knew Ireland and Northern Ireland from his time as regional affairs commissioner. He evokes a special link between de Gaulle, and by extension himself, and Ireland. Although he is eloquent on the EU’s role in the peace process, it is clear that the Northern Ireland protocol is designed primarily to protect the single market: there’s a long passage on the risk of chlorinated chicken entering the EU market by the Northern Irish back door. There are few signs that the protocol was based on any deep understanding of the compromises inherent in the Belfast/Good Friday Agreement. Barnier has little time—and less sympathy—for the DUP, in contrast to warm discussions with Sinn Féin, who he always seems to meet first. For Barnier it’s “unimaginable” for the island of Ireland to have two different regulatory regimes; he accepts Johnson’s argument for a consent mechanism in the Northern Ireland assembly, but then formulates it in a way that upsets Unionists; he seems reluctant to recognise that there are many in Northern Ireland whose opposition to reunification defines their very identity. The roots of the current difficulties with the implementation of the protocol go back a long way.
Third, in a negotiation it can help to have some kind of positive vision to aim for. Throughout the discussion on the withdrawal agreement, Barnier’s objectives were defensive: securing the “divorce bill,” citizens’ rights, the protocol, protecting geographical indications on products. Overall, the EU approached Brexit as a bomb to be defused. The diaries cover the political declaration, the part of the withdrawal deal that was meant to look ahead, but for Barnier its purpose is mostly about avoiding unfair competition while preserving bits of the old relationship that worked for the EU, hence his frustration when Johnson and Frost say they don’t feel bound by it and aren’t interested in any formal co-operation on defence or foreign policy. The subsequent trade negotiations rapidly descend into a battle of attrition.
Barnier does devote the final paragraphs to his “vision,” recognising the historic links between the UK and Europe, and looking forward to future co-operation on shared challenges from pandemics to terrorism, climate change to financial instability. It’s not much, but it may be a start. Certainly we need to get beyond a situation where Whitehall prefers to ignore the EU, and the EU is more interested in its relationship with Joe Biden and managing China than in rebuilding relations with its neighbour.
Will the diaries help Barnier’s presidential campaign? He’s been lauded by many in the EU for staying the course. But he could come across as a little “too European” for France, which might be why he’s started talking tough on illegal migration. He’s the “sleepy Joe” candidate, but France might not be looking for that kind of balm. If Brexit turns out to have been his last big gig, there’s always the book signings.
La grande illusion: Journal secret du Brexit (2016-2020) by Michel Barnier (Gallimard, €23)
