So now we know: these insufferable Eurocrats don’t want a deal. They just want Brexit to fail

THE biggest arguments in divorce cases are almost always about the money. The needs of the children tend to be cast aside: sometimes, they are even used as hostages.

Something similar is happening in the negotiations between the UK and the European Commission over our so-called divorce from the EU.

At the insistence of the Commission — which in effect is acting as the divorce lawyer for the 27 remaining states — the UK must agree to cough up a vast sum before we can even begin to discuss the post-Brexit trading terms between us.

In other words, the long-term future of families in the EU — the people who will benefit most from an amicable trade deal — is less important than getting lots of dosh up front.

This is understandable from the Commission’s point of view. While the UK’s contribution to the EU’s finances may not be significant in terms of those countries’ overall economies, it is of enormous consequence to the Commission itself, amounting to 14 per cent of its total income — notably the salaries and the pensions of the 35,000 or so officials who work for it.

Fanatical

The most influential of those officials is not the President of the Commission, JeanClaude Juncker. No, the man of power there is that bibulous and erratic Luxembourger’s chief of staff, Martin Selmayr.

This 46-year-old German lawyer is known in the corridors of the Berlaymont as ‘the monster’. Both brilliant and a fearsome bully, Selmayr is a fanatical believer in ‘the project’ and is determined not only that Britain is punished for its decision to leave, but so obviously punished that no other nation will ever again even dream of taking the same action.

According to a German friend of mine who knows Selmayr, ‘he actually wants the negotiations to fail. He thinks this would be the biggest deterrent of all’.

On that interpretation, the German will be delighted at the conduct of last weekend’s round of talks in Brussels between Davis and Michel Barnier, the Frenchman appointed by Juncker/Selmayr as chief Brexit negotiator for the European Commission.

Once more, the money has been the cause of increased ill-will, with Barnier accusing the UK of being ‘unwilling to honour its obligations’ and Davis blaming Brussels for ‘putting process before people’ — that is, the money before the children in the divorce.

Bizarrely, the Commission has been increasing its financial demands as the months have dragged on.

In all normal negotiations, the two sides gradually come closer together and meet in the middle. When we embarked on this process, the talk from the Brussels side was of a demand of €60 billion to settle what it insisted were the UK’s inescapable budgetary and legal obligations. Yet now they are talking of €100 billion, a figure for which the Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson reasonably said they could ‘go whistle’.

There is an impasse, as Brussels says it won’t talk about future trading arrangements until the outlines of the ‘divorce bill’ are agreed, while Davis understandably regards this matter as his principal point of leverage in getting a good deal for Britain in terms of a tariff-free arrangement with the members of the European Single Market.

While Brussels has the greater economic muscle, in that it represents 27 nations, the British have the advantage of being right — in the sense that Article 50 of the Lisbon Treaty (which governs this whole business) does not contain any provision for continuing obligations, let alone ones involving payments by the departing member.

Article 50 just says that two years after it has been invoked, the relevant member state exits automatically — and in the absence of any succeeding agreement between the leaver and the rest of the bloc, the existing treaties just fall away.

This is what May meant when she told an apparently astonished Juncker and Selmayr at a Downing Street dinner four months ago, that in the absence of a deal based on a reasonable financial settlement in exchange for frictionless access to the single market, Britain ‘does not owe the European Union a single penny’.

Provocation

Legally, she is on solid ground — and this, to Barnier’s evident consternation, was what British Government lawyers would have been emphasising last weekend.

They might have especially annoyed him by pointing out that, regarding the pensions of the EU’s bureaucrats, the UK has been properly funding them on a continual basis during our membership and therefore there is nothing more we will owe.

The UK’s scrupulous legalism has been an unbearable provocation to a Frenchman who embodies the phrase amour-propre (self-love). It explains his insufferably pompous remark yesterday that it was his job to ‘teach the British people what Brexit means’.

We know what Brexit means. It is the European Commission which can’t face up to the truth.