End this French farce over getting a good Brexit deal
IWOULD never deny a Prime Minister a proper holiday – on the contrary, I wish sometimes our leaders would take more time off, and so come back to Downing Street with a fresh perspective on the hugely important decisions they have to make.
Nevertheless, Theresa May’s decision to take a day out of her Italian break to meet Emmanuel Macron at the French president’s Mediterranean retreat is a wise one. She and her ministers are at last doing what they should have started doing months ago: appealing over the head of Michel Barnier, the EU’s chief Brexit negotiator, to the individual leaders of the EU’s other 27 nations to try to make progress in establishing a free trade deal between Britain and the EU.
I am not sure that today’s meeting is going to achieve instant results. National leaders of other EU states, who are being visited by Mrs May’s cabinet colleagues as part of a coordinated charm offensive, are likely to be more co-operative. But one thing is sure: if we are to avoid a “no deal” Brexit, with the negative consequences that would bring for the EU as well as for Britain, some way must be found around the immense, immovable stumbling block that is Michel Barnier.
BARNIER’S tactic has been clear almost since the moment he was appointed as the EU’s chief negotiator. It is to stonewall British proposals in the hope of bouncing Britain at the last moment into what for us would be a thoroughly bad deal. He wants Britain to be bound by EU rules on trade, product standards, free movement and an open export market for French wine and German cars – while we continue to pay into EU coffers and our financial services industry is frozen out of EU markets.
That is a deal that no sane British PM could agree to. Nevertheless, Barnier still seems to think he can pull it off. For months he refused to start trade negotiations on the grounds that first we had to agree to pay a divorce bill. When Mrs May did so last December, still he wouldn’t start trade talks. Instead he began fussing over the Irish border.
His reaction to the Chequers proposals was utterly predictable: