‘Monster of Brussels’ blasts Downing Street’s bunker mentality

A KEY EU official involved in the Brexit talks yesterday attacked Theresa May’s ‘bunker’ mentality in No 10.

Martin Selmayr, the controversial chief of staff to EU Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker, said Mrs May was ‘even worse’ than David Cameron.

And the German – known as ‘the monster’ in Brussels for his ruthless methods – revealed that his hostility to Brexit was forged when he met Margaret Thatcher as a student and heard her ‘blast’ John Major for abandoning her anti-EU stance. Selmayr, 46, a member of the EU Brexit negotiating team, is reportedly behind moves to ‘punish’ Britain with a £50 billion bill for leaving.

He was scathing about the way both Mr Cameron and Mrs May conducted EU relations. He said: ‘In London it’s like a bunker, it was a bunker in Cameron’s times and it’s a bunker now – it’s even worse. It’s difficult to communicate and understand each other if you don’t come out of your closet.’

He said Britain’s differences with Brussels were harder to resolve because key Downing Street figures were ‘never here to talk to us – so it’s very difficult to judge how they see things’. Selmayr, a lawyer, saw Lady Thatcher speak in London in 1993 when she railed about Britain being ‘alone in Europe in not having been invaded for 1,000 years’.

She ‘basically blasted’ her successor Mr Major, said Selmayr. He told the Financial Times: ‘I saw the big misunderstanding between Britain and the rest of the EU. For the Germans and French it is unthinkable to see the European project only as a market: it is an instrument to achieve something more.’

And on his ‘Rasputin’ reputation, Selmayr said: ‘It can be flattering if it means I’m not a wimp. Juncker is the good guy. I’m the bad guy. That’s how it is.’