Second paragraph of third daily entry:

I have personally encountered Michel Barnier I think on three occasions. Way back in about 2002, he was one of the speakers at the opening of the Northern Ireland representative office in Brussels, as the then European Commissioner for Regional Policy. He made quite a good speech, but he made it in French, which was increasingly unusual even then. Fast forward to 2018 when Alexander Stubb was running against Manfred Weber to be the EPP’s lead candidate for the European Commission (and lost); I was leafletting incoming delegates at the EPP convention in Helsinki on Stubb’s behalf and happened to encounter Barnier, who muttered (in fluent English) that he would have to maintain his neutrality. And at the end of 2023, I caught him and Stubb chatting (again in English) at a Brussels conference we were all attending. Everyone else was taking pictures of them too, and indeed in the following year, 2024, Stubb was elected President of Finland and Barnier was briefly Prime Minister of France.

I wrote, blogged and tweeted (remember Twitter?) extensively about Brexit before, during and after the period when Barnier was the EU’s chief negotiator with the UK. My perceptions, as a fairly well-informed Brussels bubble-er, are not very different from his. There was never any intention in Brussels or the rest of the EU to sneakily reverse the decision of the UK to leave; there was however a determination that the subsequent relationship would not unduly favour the Brits. The key points that Barnier makes about the dynamics of the negotiations are conclusions that I had already drawn, but it is reassuring to see them supported here.

The most important point is that there had to be full transparency among all stakeholders on the EU side, to make sure that all 27 governments, and the European Parliament, and the European Commission (which was Barnier’s immediate paymaster), had confidence that Barnier was representing their point of view. This approach locked the whole EU into support for Barnier as negotiator, because they believed that he was supporting them. It meant that British efforts to detach EU governments from Barnier were inevitably futile, because they were always going to have more confidence in the guy who they were talking to regularly and who claimed to understand their situations, rather than the shifty Brits, who could not even agree their own line at home.

Indeed, Barnier’s main frustration in the first phase was that Theresa May failed to articulate or decide what the UK actually wanted; a fatal and unforced disadvantage for the British – if you do not know what you want, you are unlikely to get it. In the second phase, under Boris Johnson, David Frost seemed clearly to have instructions to run out the clock and force a last-minute decision which the UK (wrongly) thought would break in their favour. The British perception was that the EU was desperate to avoid a no-deal Brexit, but in fact contingency planning for that on the EU side had started as soon as the referendum results came in, and the Brits (as usual) were way behind the curve.

I was interested in a couple of Barnier’s personal observations, which need to be tempered by the obvious fact that he has massaged his diary notes for publication. Reading between the lines, he clearly regarded David Davis as convivial company, but fundamentally very stupid, which is pretty much how Davis came across at the time and comes across now. There is a ‘lost hero’ narrative believed by some on the Tory right, that Davis was astutely negotiating for British interests until May sneakily entrusted Olly Robbins with doing the deal behind his back. In fact, Davis did nothing but occasionally visit TV studios to muddy the waters.

Second, the one person on his own side who Barnier does regard with suspicion and annoyance is Martin Selmayr, who on a couple of occasions tried to bypass or minimise Barnier’s role, purely for the sake of bureaucratic turf-warring; there was no ideological difference between them. On these occasions, Barnier went straight to Juncker, who corrected the situation quickly. Juncker himself comes across as somewhat disengaged, but engaged enough to be supportive of Barnier’s work.

I was also interested to note that about twenty people who I know personally crop up in the narrative, usually in complimentary terms – including even Diane Dodds of the DUP! Barnier felt that he knew Northern Ireland a bit – as noted above, my own first encounter with him was at a Northern Ireland event – and while I don’t think he knew it quite as intimately as he perhaps believed, he certainly displayed more knowledge and sympathy than anyone in the British Conservative government (I’ll make an honourable exception for the six months of Julian Smith in 2019-20).

There is an argument in some EU and British circles that Barnier created problems by negotiating too successfully and putting the UK in a worse position at the end than it needed to be. I must say I think that the blame for the UK doing badly in the negotiations does not, in my view, rest with the other side. I found this a useful though not a challenging read. You can get My Secret Brexit Diary here.

Second paragraph of third chapter:

As early as 1940 there had been proposals in Britain for sharing sovereignty with another European country, namely France. Jean Monnet was yet again working to coordinate the economic efforts of the two allies, and convinced the British government to seek political union with his native country. On 16 June de Gaulle transmitted the offer to Paul Reynaud’s French government in Bordeaux, but Reynaud lost power to Marshal Pétain on the same day. Pétain, who favoured an armistice with the Germans, asked why France would wish to ‘fuse with a corpse’.² And so it is perhaps not so surprising that Winston Churchill emerged after the war as one of the leading champions of a united Europe. Out of power since July 1945, in September of the following year he gave a speech in Zurich in which he called for the construction of ‘a kind of United States of Europe’. ‘The first step in the recreation of the European Family must be a partnership between France and Germany. In this way only can France recover the moral and cultural leadership of Europe … In all this urgent work, France and Germany must take the lead together.’ (At this stage, it must be said, the French doubted the wisdom of giving the Germans such a role.) Over the next two years Churchill tirelessly advocated for a united Europe, which he regarded as being fully compatible with Britain’s imperial commitments. Indeed, Britain’s claim to continuing great-power status lay precisely in the fact that the country, uniquely, lay at the centre of ‘three interlinked circles’: the first and most important was the British Commonwealth and Empire, the second was the English-speaking world, and the third was a united Europe.³
² Ibid. [Grob-Fitzgibbon (2016)], p. 18.
³ https://winstonchurchill.org/publications/finest-hour/finest-hour-160/articles-wsc-s-three-majestic-circles/.

I know Kevin O’Rourke from many years ago when the two of us were invited on a residential seminar in Tuscany by a mutual friend, and I also vaguely knew his father, a senior Irish ambassador, but we have not met in 35 years. Since then he has become a prominent economic historian, currently teaching in Abu Dhabi, but in Oxford at the time this book was being written, during the death throes of Brexit in the summer of 2019.

Because of its timing, the book misses the excitement of the end of the chase – the hasty just-before-Christmas deal of 2019, followed by the Johnson and then Truss governments’ attempts to wriggle out of their own commitments, ending, at least for now, with Sunak’s deal (his only significant achievement in two years at the top).

But it makes up for that with a significant amount of detail about how the EU was set up in the first place, and the UK’s role outside and inside the process, a story which is centred on France and its relationship with Germany and to a lesser extent the UK, and therefore tends to be neglected by British commentators. He also goes in detail into the economic history of Ireland and why EU membership became fundamental to the Irish state. I think that both of these elements are possibly educational for readers who consumed only the mainstream (ie non-Irish) Anglophone media during the process while it was happening.

He doesn’t waste much time on David Cameron’s attempt to renegotiate the UK’s membership of the EU, but looks in some detail at the referendum result (which he feels was overdetermined; I tend to agree), and then does his best to explain Theresa May’s negotiation process. I still find it difficult to believe how pathetic the UK’s approach was in those early stages; May was ill-served by her treacherous and stupid ministers, Johnson and Davis, but the failure to come up with a detailed plan for the UK was her fault and her responsibility.

Anyway, the book itself as an important antidote to the UK perspective that Brexit was a purely British political story, in particular presenting the Irish view in its European context. You can get it here.

This was the non-fiction book that had lingered longest unread on my bookshelves. Next on that pile is All American Boys, by Walter Cunningham.