Who’d want to be ruled by the risible Juncker and his poison-spreading Brussels sidekick?

LAST week, Theresa May had the dinner party guest from Hell. Jean-Claude Juncker, President of the European Commission, visited 10 Downing Street for preliminary Brexit talks followed by a private dinner.

Our Anglican-parson’s-daughter Prime Minister, abstemious and demure, may not have much in common with Luxembourger Juncker, a boozer with wandering hands, a bad pinball habit and unfortunate family connections with the Third Reich; but, hey, you must sometimes put Queen and country first.

And so Mrs May went out of her way to make Mr Juncker feel welcome, even stepping out into the street to embrace him (kissing Juncker is like grappling with an octopus).

She extended the dinner invitation to his sidekicks. The best silver was polished and the wine was up to its customary standards. Mr Juncker, after all, is a thirsty fellow.

Horror

At the end of the night, the important (if unelected) Eurocrat tottered off to his waiting limousine, waving cheerio apparently full of good cheer. Was it just the vino talking?

A few days later, that poisonous account of the evening appeared in a German newspaper, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung, saying the dinner had been a horror from start to finish.

Mr Juncker had snarled at Mrs May that ‘Brexit cannot be a success’. He had plonked two fat documents on the table to show her how complicated EU trade negotiations can be.

He had left in a huff, telling her he was now ‘ten times more sceptical’ than ever about Brexit. Oh, and the British hosts — Mrs May and her Brexit secretary — had squabbled among themselves.

Plainly, someone in the Juncker party had been talking.

Putting to one side the simple bad manners, what should we make of what the Germans are calling ‘das desastrose Brexit-Dinner’. Was it indeed ‘eine Katastrophe’? If so, for whom? And where does it leave the Brexit talks?

Mrs May has dismissed it as ‘Brussels gossip’. By ‘Brussels’, she probably meant Juncker’s chief-of-staff, a German lawyer called Martin Selmayr, who was at the dinner and is said to have been the source of the story.

Indeed, as Juncker left, Herr Selmayr could be seen lingering in No 10’s hallway alongside Mrs May who was throwing back her head with laughter. All seemed well. But with Herr Selmayr you must never take things at face value.

His nicknames in Brussels include ‘the Monster’, ‘Lenin’, ‘Rasputin’ and ‘Darth Vader’. Rasputin was the sinister adviser to the Russian royal family before the revolution exactly 100 years ago. Martin Selmayr may not be quite as exotic, but he may be no less deadly to his own side.

However, Mr Juncker is his boss and the man who must take responsibility for the ‘leak’ to the German paper — and what is being seen in Westminster as a taste of things to come, a blatant bullying tactic to over-shadow preliminary Brexit talks.

Mr Juncker likes to ‘take ownership’ of world statesmen by patting their faces and backs, pinching their cheeks and giving them whiskyscented triple-kisses (his favourite tipple is Glenfarclas single malt, which he knocks back like breakfast fruit juice).

If he has an idealised view of the European Union, that may be because he is emotionally scarred by his father’s experience of forcible conscription into the Wehrmacht on the Russian front. (In intriguing contrast, his father-in-law was one of Hitler’s so-called Propaganda Commissars.)

Many former presidents of the European Commission (which is the EU’s powerful civil service) have regarded the position as an end-ofcareer consolation. For our friend Jean-Claude, however, it has come as a wonderful boon, propelling this obscure former finance and prime minister of tiny Luxembourg on to the global stage.

His time in charge of his home country, which is the size of Surrey, was flecked by allegations of bibulous womanising, tax evasion by multinational corporations and chaotic extravagance, spending taxpayers’ money not only on vanity projects but also on a swanky private jet.

The man who so perfectly embodies all the faults of the European Union and its scheming bureaucracy plainly has a jolly time being EC President, but is he the intellectual power at the Commission, or is that his sulphurous Svengali, Herr Selmayr?

A Westminster journalist colleague of mine who used to work in Brussels gives an example of the Selmayr modus

operandi. He once urged my friend to write something that turned out to be untrue.

When the journalist later complained that he had been cynically misled, Selmayr replied: ‘That was a tactic. I have tactics. When I speak to journalists, I don’t speak because I’m a nice guy. I want to achieve something. You write it. Somebody reads it. I instrumentalise you.’

Obstacle

In early 2016, when David Cameron was trying to re-negotiate UK terms with the EU (in the hope that it would persuade British voters to remain in the EU), Herr Selmayr was seen as an obstacle.

The Cameron team concluded that Herr Selmayr actively wanted Britain to leave the EU. Perhaps he thought a European superstate, dominated by Germany, would be more easily achieved once Britain was gone.

Although Berlin is not altogether keen on Herr Selmayr — Germany’s respected finance minister, Wolfgang Schauble, once called him a ‘meddler’ for leaking sensitive material — it was noticeable that after last week’s dinner at Downing Street, Angela Merkel took very much the Juncker (or Selmayr) line in saying that Mrs May had Brexit ‘delusions’.

In public, Mr Juncker is insisting the dinner went fine (although, with characteristic clumsiness, he joked about the British food not being up to much). In private, we have this tale of antagonism.

Details of diplomatic dinners are normally kept secret, at least until the politicians involved write their memoirs. There is a good reason for that discretion. Privacy allows politicians to speak more openly and to trust one another. That, in turn, makes a final agreement more likely.

Venomous

Does the European Commission, not least Martin Selmayr, want to stymie any Brexit deal? We in Britain could live with that. No deal really would be better than a bad deal — and the Commission must know that.

‘No deal’ would also allow the Commission to shrug its shoulders, criticise the perfidious British, and make EU exit sound more daunting for other countries.

But ‘no deal’ would be disastrous — ‘eine Katastrophe’— for German car manufacturers, French vineyards and cheesemakers, Spanish farmers and the many industries of the EU which export to us.

The 27 nations of the EU will see that and will want the Commission to reach a compromise with London. Last weekend’s venomous briefing needs to be seen in the context of those pressures rather than as a simplistic ‘EC versus UK’ fight.

Downing Street is keeping out of the fray. The paradox is that the row has probably helped Mrs May. The British voters will look at this puerile behaviour and conclude that they were never wiser than when, last June, they decided to get the heck out of the EU.

Who on earth would want to be ruled by such gossipy oafs as the risible Mr Juncker and his slippery sidekick?