A breach of trust?

“It has become sadly common for foreign powers to be accused of intervening in elections,” said The Economist. “But usually it is Russia or China that is said to be involved.” Last week, Theresa May accused EU officials of “trying to affect the general election result”, and of attempting to sabotage Brexit talks – evidence of quite how bad relations have become between Britain and Brussels. The “souring of the mood” came after the German newspaper Frankfurter Allgemeine Sonntagszeitung published a “colourful” account of a “disastrous” dinner between May and the EU Commission president, Jean-claude Juncker, in London last month: Juncker apparently told May that he was leaving Downing Street “ten times more sceptical” that a Brexit deal could be reached, and concluded that she was living in a “different galaxy”. His “combative” chief of staff, Martin Selmayr, was widely blamed for the leak.

It was a “shocking breach of diplomatic protocol from Juncker and his henchmen”, said Janet Daley in The Sunday Telegraph. Visiting officials from supposedly friendly nations “do not brief, in aggressively personal terms, against national leaders who are running for office”. May was right to fight back, said the Daily Mail. The “European elites” are panicked at the thought of her winning a “thumping” majority, and are doing all they can to promote “Remainer candidates”. Really, asked Janan Ganesh in the FT – by briefing against her in a German-language paper? It seems unlikely. The leak was a serious “breach of trust”. But it was aimed at a German audience; it was nothing to do with our election. And May’s reaction was equally “belligerent”. She may have won a few votes with her warlike speech, but by worsening relations with the EU, she is imperilling the “national interest”.

The scale of the impending disaster is becoming clear, said Will Hutton in The Observer. Unless May changes her position quite substantially, the gulf between the UK and the EU is simply too wide for a deal to be possible. Britain is “certain to go over a cliff; the only question is how great the fall”. Like most loveless marriages, this one is ending in “screaming rows about the money”, said Dominic Lawson in The Sunday Times. The EU’S initial demand for a divorce bill of some s60bn seems to have shot up, to s100bn- plus. This isn’t just Juncker making trouble; it comes from the member states. The UK pays 12% of the EU budget, so Brexit will create a funding “chasm” that terrifies European leaders. Quite apart from dealing with the nitty-gritty, the Government needs to “prepare for the propaganda war”, said Juliet Samuel in The Daily Telegraph. The Commission will try to portray the UK’S leaders as “inept fantasists”, as it did with Greece. So Britain needs to come across as “eminently reasonable”; and it must, at all costs, rein in the xenophobic rhetoric. “If Britons and Europeans start to see one another fundamentally as enemies, a deal will become impossible.”