Barnier mission near impossible
MICHEL Barnier will get his battle orders next week for the final phase of his Brexit campaign. On Tuesday, ministers from all 27 EU member nations are due to gather to set their chief negotiator’s objectives in the wrangle over a trade deal with the UK. Downing Street insiders expect another day of posturing in Brussels with little clarity amid the fog of trade war.
Early drafts of Mr Barnier’s negotiating mandate suggest European leaders are increasingly divided about what they want out of the discussions, due to begin next month, on a UK-EU trade deal. So far, the process has been used as an excuse for raising historic national grievances, from Spanish ambitions to snatch Gibraltar to Greek demands for the Elgin Marbles to return to Athens from the British Museum.
The early threats are being regarded with amusement rather than trepidation among Boris Johnson’s team. “There doesn’t seem to be much serious thinking going on in Brussels,” said one Government insider. The Prime Minister and his European trade negotiator David Frost will give the ragbag of demands short shrift.
Downing Street aides are confident the balance of power between Britain and the EU has tilted dramatically since a year ago. Back then, the enfeebled Theresa May, shorn of a Commons majority and with Cabinet collective responsibility shredded, faced a united EU intent on punishing the UK for daring to leave the bloc.
TWELVE months on, Mr Johnson is backed by a unified Cabinet marshalled with iron discipline and an 80-strong Tory majority in the Commons. The Prime Minister has set out a clear request for a Canada-style trade deal while unequivocally signalling his readiness to walk out of the negotiations if the EU continues its insistence that the newly independent UK should stay tied into Brussels rules, regulations and meddling courts for ever. He heads a Government looking more stable than any in Europe in contrast to his fading EU counterparts.
In Germany, Angela Merkel is counting down the final days of her chancellorship with her Christian
Democrat party consumed by a succession crisis. France’s President Emmanuel Macron’s government continues to slide into deep unpopularity. Irish Taoiseach Leo Varadkar, who helped torture Mrs May in the wrangle over the Brexit Withdrawal Agreement, this week confirmed his time in office is coming to an end. Even the EU’s leadership has weakened dramatically in recent months. Jean-Claude Juncker, a veteran of decades of Brussels manoeuvring and backroom fixing, has been replaced as European Commission chief by the inexperienced Ursula von der Leyen.
Less than a month after the UK’s exit from the EU, the bloc is facing a crisis over how to fill the budget black hole left by the cancellation of the multibillion-pound British membership fees.
GERMANY and other net contributors to Brussels are at loggerheads with poorer southern European nations about where to find the cash.An unseemly all-night wrangle over the budget broke up at 5am yesterday in deadlock.
looming financial crisis has crept up on a bloc which spent far too long pretending to itself that the UK was not serious about leaving.Yet the belligerent noises about the trade negotiations suggest EU chiefs are still in denial about the reality of a post-Brexit Europe.
European leaders with stagnating economies and cash demands from Brussels have everything to fear from reduced exports to the UK under World Trade Organisation tariffs imposed if a trade deal cannot be agreed. Mr Johnson and his negotiating team need have little concern about the mission impossible instructions expected to be handed to Mr Barnier this week.
ANNA Soubry, Chuka Umunna and other former MPs from the now defunct Change UK party were widely mocked on social media this week exactly a year after celebrating the foundation of the ill-fated pro-EU splinter group by going out for dinner at a Nando’s. “You certainly changed the look of Parliament now you have all been voted out,” one online wag told them.
SIMON Hoare has denounced former Commons Speaker John Bercow’s moans about his lack of a peerage as “too distasteful for words”. Borrowing a Bercow catchphrase, the Tory MP wondered on Twitter: “Perhaps a calming medicament is required?”
A MEETING area set up in the atrium of Parliament’s Portcullis House at a £33,000 cost to taxpayers is already proving popular. With MPs away on their half-term break, researchers and other Commons staff were seen lounging on the armchairs and sofas scoffing crisps and toasted sandwiches throughout the week despite signs saying: “Please refrain from eating in this area.”
LIB Dem activists are being warned that handing out leaflets for fringe causes is banned at the party’s spring conference in York next month. “Excessive distribution of promotional literature is not in line with the party’s environmental policies,” says the conference programme. It may surprise millions of voters whose doormats were littered with Lib Dem propaganda during the election campaign.
CAROLINE Flint, ousted from her Don Valley seat as Labour’s Red Wall of northern strongholds collapsed at the election, has been given a consolation prize by admirers. “This morning in the post I received a Red Wall Award for the ‘most-missed Labour MP’ in the form of a polystyrene red brick,” she reported on Twitter, adding: “Thanks – could come in handy.”
TORY gossips wonder why Boris Johnson and partner Carrie Symonds have not been in public together since before the general election. Speculation is rife as to whether next week’s Black and White Ball, the party’s biggest fund-raising bash, will see the couple break cover at last.