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Michel Barnier openly wondered if Boris Johnson was pursuing a “crazy strategy” in the Brexit negotiations and was on the verge of losing faith in the UK’s ability to keep its word during the grueling talks, according to his newspapers. .
The EU’s chief negotiator for more than three years writes that the EU side was left speechless by the unpredictable approach of the British prime minister, whom Barnier referred to at one point as “political cinema”.
Barnier’s diaries, which will be published on Thursday in French and English later this year, are published as the EU and the UK face off. implementing post-Brexit agreements they negotiated laboriously after Britain’s 2016 vote to leave the bloc.
The EU and the United Kingdom have been facing a new system of trade rules for Northern Ireland since the beginning of the year, while the French and Johnson governments are currently closed. a dispute over fishing licenses.
Barnier, which is now discussed as a potential center-right candidate in next year’s French presidential election, he left his role as chief negotiator for Brexit following the UK’s exit from the EU’s single market on 1 January.
His book – The big illusion: a secret Brexit newspaper – highlights a key moment of crisis in September 2020, when the Johnson government moved to annul its own divorce agreement with Brussels in connection with the agreements to avoid a hard border on the island of Ireland.
Barnier writes on September 8, 2020: “The team currently at 10 Downing St is not adapting to the bets and challenges of Brexit. . . I just don’t have any anymore [a feeling of] confidence. Well, we need confidence to reach an agreement. “
Barnier speculated whether the British had simply tried to “give themselves another lever in the negotiations, willing to abandon it later. Therefore, a ‘crazy strategy,'” he writes.
The 542-page book records the EU’s appeal to some of the British Prime Minister’s suggestions during the two sides’ negotiations on a future relationship agreement: a start-up process during 2020 that was pursued by the Covid-19 pandemic and disagreed consortia on commercial conditions and fish.
In front of one dinner in December 2020, Barnier confided in his newspaper his impression that the British Prime Minister was not adequately prepared compared to his EU counterparts.
During the meal in Brussels with the President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen, and in a previous meeting with his predecessor Jean-Claude Juncker, Barnier had the impression that Johnson “had not taken the time to examine himself, with his teams ”, before the meetings.
At the December 2020 dinner, this impression became apparent when Johnson raised the idea of agreeing with the EU on a foreign policy defense and cooperation pact if a broader future relationship agreement could not be found.
Barnier quickly pointed out to Johnson that this directly contradicts the UK’s stated position against including these two areas in future relationship talks. Barnier says Johnson responded by asking his own team, “Who gave that order?” The Frenchman continues to point out, “Theaters continue.”
Barnier’s memoirs repeatedly refer to the failure of British politicians to reach an agreement with the complex consequences of the 2016 referendum decision. For example, he remembers being “stunned” by Theresa May’s Lancaster House speech in 2017, and in particular for the “number of doors it closed, one after the other”, when it came to the scope of the UK’s future relations with the EU.
Brussels ’bewilderment over Brexit’s approach to the UK escalated after Johnson came to power in 2019.
At one point, the EU’s chief negotiator called for guidance in a column written years ago by Johnson in The Telegraph. In the article, published in 2013, the British Prime Minister advocated “throwing a dead cat on the table” to escape an argument that is being lost.
When Johnson decided to suspend talks in mid-October 2020, after observing a statement adopted by EU leaders, Barnier described it as “London-orchestrated psychodrama”.
The newspapers make it clear that Barnier sees Johnson as an embodiment of Britain’s struggle to meet the realities of Brexit.
He cites a meeting between Johnson and Juncker at a Luxembourg restaurant in 2019 where the commission set out its position on arrangements for Northern Ireland.
Barnier recalls thinking Johnson opened his eyes to a “series of technical or legal issues that his own team hadn’t explained to him clearly enough.”
Number 10 refused to comment on Barnier’s book.
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