Sceptical Europe gives lukewarm welcome to new prime minister
EUROPE welcomed Boris Johnson as Britain’s next prime minister yesterday with a thinly veiled reminder that it has no plans to renegotiate Theresa May’s divorce package.
Within seconds of the result being announced, Michel Barnier, the EU’S chief Brexit negotiator, said he would work “constructively” with Mr Johnson to “facilitate the ratification of the Withdrawal Agreement”.
There was no mention of any alternatives to that agreement despite Mr Johnson’s repeated warnings that the Withdrawal Agreement was “dead” after being rejected three times by Parliament.
Mr Barnier, who negotiated the deal based on orders from the other 27 EU countries, repeated that Europe was willing only to “rework” the Political Declaration on the future relationship with Europe.
EU diplomatic sources said that Europe would not give up on the Irish backstop until the UK could explain how it would maintain an “invisible” border in Northern Ireland while leaving the single market and customs union as Mr Johnson has promised.
A senior source close to the EU negotiations said that Europe would “wait and see” how Mr Johnson pitched his negotiation once installed in No10, but added that hard talk of “no deal” and “binning the backstop” would result in the EU disengaging quickly.
Frans Timmermans, the liberal Dutch EU commissioner, noted that Mr Johnson had not always been a hardbitten anti-european, alluding to hopes in the bloc that he will be more emollient in office than on the stump.
Across the Atlantic, Donald Trump, the US president, tweeted his congratulations to Mr Johnson, adding: “He will be great!” It is not yet clear how quickly Mr Johnson will travel to Washington, or whether he will meet Mr Trump before senior EU leaders.
Elsewhere across Europe the buzzword used in unison by Mr Barnier, Emmanuel Macron, the French president, and the Irish deputy prime minister Simon Coveney was “constructive” – but with little hint of any concessions to come.
“We will work constructively with Mr Johnson and his government to maintain and strengthen British-irish relations through the challenges of Brexit,” Mr Coveney wrote on Twitter.
In a crumb of possible comfort to Mr Johnson, Mr Macron noted that he looked forward to working with the UK on the Iran oil tanker stand-off.
“I want very much to work with him as quickly as possible and not just on European subjects and the continuation of negotiations linked to Brexit, but also on international issues … like the situation in Iran,” he said.
Ursula von der Leyen, the former German defence minister who will become the next president of the European Commission on Nov 1, said she was looking forward to a good working relationship to tackle many “difficult” and “challenging” issues.
There was a hint of steel from Guy Verhofstadt, the European parliament’s Brexit coordinator, who has campaigned to protect the rights of the 3.2million EU citizens who will remain in the UK after Brexit. In a sign of his
‘I very much want to work with Mr Johnson as quickly as possible on European and international issues’
continued determination to stand firm on the issue, Mr Verhofstadt said he was “looking forward to defending the interests of all Europeans” and that his committee would meet today to discuss Mr Johnson’s appointment.
Mr Johnson has already hinted strongly that he intends to guarantee unilaterally to grandfather the rights of EU citizens as set out in the Withdrawal Agreement by writing them into UK law.
Further away from the coalface of the negotiations, the language directed at Mr Johnson was coarser.
Franziska Brantner, the spokesman for the German Greens, said Tory party members had “crowned a notorious liar and gambler” as the next prime minister.
The negative sentiments were followed by Vytenis Andriukaitis, Lithuania’s EU commissioner, who accused Mr Johnson and his supporters of undermining democracy via “cheap promises, simplified visions [and] blatantly evident incorrect statements”.