A sombre moment, M. Barnier? Not for those who want to go. We’re delighted!
ANOTHER inexorable step to freedom, mes braves: the Brexit talks with Brussels started properly yesterday and at the end of a day which began with presents and included a slap-up lunch, the two chief negotiators held a reasonably civilised press conference.
The EU’s man is Michel Barnier, tall, dandyish, shades of Nicholas Parsons presenting ‘Sale of the Century from Norwich’ a few decades ago. Our bloke: David Davis, Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union. DD was a bit dishevelled but next to sleek Michel even the mannequins in a Savile Row shop window would look untidy.
Yesterday’s platitudes, as most of them were, will not have meant much but for Brexiteers the mere sight of the two negotiating teams facing each other across a large room (separated by that much space to stop fisticuffs?) was tremendous. We’re on the way. We really are leaving the European empire.
‘It is a very sombre moment,’ said M Barnier. Not for those of us who for decades wanted to Leave, it isn’t, Michel. We’re delighted!
Mr Davis was marginally the more jovial of the two.
M Barnier was a model of diplomacy until a finishing swipe in which he talked gravely about ‘the consequences’ of our vote to leave the EU. ‘The UK is leaving the Single Market and the Customs Union, not the other way round,’ he said, the diplomat suddenly yielding to an upset divorce lawyer. ‘Do not underestimate the consequences,’ he said, not quite waggling a forefinger as long as a carrot. Almost as an afterthought he added: ‘It is not about revenge.’
Earlier, they had traded quotations. M Barnier, loyal Eurocrat that he is, quoted Jean Monnet, founding father of the EU, who said he was neither an optimist nor a pessimist but ‘determined’. You can read that as you wish. Determined to make Brexit a calm and ‘orderly’ affair, as he claimed at one point, or determined to make it so hideously complicated that no other EU country is impertinent enough to try to leave?
Mr Davis quoted Sir Winston Churchill: ‘A pessimist sees difficulty in every opportunity. An optimist sees possibilities in every difficulty.’ Mr Davis added: ‘I am certainly a determined optimist.’
Like football team captains exchanging pennants before a UEFA cup tie, the two men gave each other pressies: for Mr Barnier, who is a keen walker, a first edition of a mountaineering book, ‘Regards vers Annapurna’ (Regards to Anna Purna? – who’s she, then?); for Mr Davis, who is also a hiker, a hand-carved Savoyard walking stick with a leather strap, on which he can presumably gnaw at moments of stress.
At lunch, this being Brussels, there was no question of a desk sandwich or a swift half at the local pub.
THEY had a threecourse sit-down job with Belgian asparagus to start, red mullet and fondant potatoes for mains and strawberry meringue cake for pud. There was no mention of wine but that does not mean it was not on offer. Please. The European Commission is run by that noted oenophile Jean-Claude Juncker.
Was M Juncker – whose staff so egregiously betrayed details of their dinner at Downing Street in the spring – on M Barnier’s mind when he said that he deplored leaks? ‘I prefer transparency to leaks,’ he said, before saying that this was an incredibly important negotiation and he did not approach it irresponsibly. ‘Nous avons beaucoup de travail a faire.’
During questions from the media, when he was asked if he expected DD to survive as Brexit Secretary for the next two years, M Barnier allowed himself a meringue-light dig by saying how ‘interesting’ he found British politics at present. All those Europhiles who said it would make no difference to Brexit if Theresa May won big in the election have now changed their mind and say she is weakened.
Point of information: one of the British reporters who asked Mr Davis a slightly pessimistic question was James Mates. His dad Michael, once a Tory MP, ran Europhile Ken Clarke’s campaign for the Tory leadership in 1997.