Briefings for Britain, July 20, Robert Tombs
During the tortuous negotiations between the United Kingdom and the European Union (represented throughout by the veteran French politician Michel Barnier) it was widely known that alongside the official negotiations, many British politicians were having private meetings with Barnier, many of them more than once. What were they saying, and why?
Apart from Monsieur Barnier’s supposedly secret and diplomatically discreet published diary (reviewed on this site), a recent book sheds some surprising, and perhaps even shocking, light on some of these conversations. This is Inside the Deal: How the EU got Brexit done (Agenda Publishing, 2023), by Stefaan de Rynck. He was one of Barnier’s close aides, and he had a ‘ringside seat to all crucial talks’ (De Rynck p vii). Barnier praised his ‘wise and subtle analyses’, and his knowledge of British politics (Barnier p 31), which Barnier and his team naturally kept a careful eye on. Readers should check Lord Frost’s review of the book, which he describes as worthy and valuable, if a little dull.
I wish to concentrate on only one aspect: British politicians who came to meet Barnier. These meetings were widely reported by both the pro- and anti-Brexit press. They were controversial at the time. I am reminded of Wordsworth’s lines on visitors to Napoleon:
Lords, lawyers, statesmen, squires of low degree
Men known, and men unknown, sick, lame and blind,
Post forward all, like creatures of one kind,
With first-fruit offerings crowd to bend the knee
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