Michel Barnier - My Secret Brexit Diary

However, from the outset I point out – and will repeat to every new team member – that we must be ‘amicable pros’. Making sure we are professional and competent is the least we can do to honour such a historic and serious task. But being amicable is also key to increasing our collective efficiency: amicable within the team, amicable with the other Commission departments, and amicable with the outside world. I am reminded of Georges Pompidou’s insistence that no political team can do without ‘a collective morale to guide their actions’.

This morning we take a train from Brussels to The Hague – a stopping service that allows plenty of time for a four-way conversation between myself, Sabine, Stéphanie and Georg. It marks the beginning of our travels through the EU countries, the first stop on our grand tour of European capitals.

I am surprised at the length of the journey. If we want to make good on our mission, we may have to think about taking trains that don’t stop at every single station… But it must be admitted that, in just a few days and nights, and with little in the way of resources, the team has managed to put together an exceptional programme. The mission of this small ‘commando’ unit is to travel through the twenty-seven countries of the Union over a period of a few weeks, establishing personal contacts with ministers and prime ministers so as to find out where each of them draws their red lines and, in broad terms, to construct our own line of negotiation on the basis of four first principles that I will, from now on, recite to each of my interlocutors.

The journey at least gives me time to refine the messages to be conveyed to the Netherlands’ Prime Minister Mark Rutte.

First, there can be no negotiations until we receive notification from the British government. In the Council, the twenty-seven member states have been very clear on this point.

Second, we will only succeed in this negotiation by building and maintaining very strong unity between the twenty-seven member states.

Third, no EU country should find itself in a position where it is has less say than a country outside the Union.

And finally, no country outside the Union should be given a veto on, or even the right to intervene in, the decision-making process of the twenty-seven.

These are the key points to which we will hold fast throughout our work, and which are the conditions for its success.

Mark Rutte is very direct and friendly. I am impressed by the way he delegates and manages his cabinet, the key members of which he has brought together for the occasion. He and his ministers express full support for our team and he tells me that, for him, the interests and unity of the twenty-seven member states will be paramount throughout the negotiations, despite his country’s strong relationship with the UK.

From The Hague we head straight for Bucharest. In the Romanian capital I meet my friend Dacian Cioloș, now Prime Minister of this great country, set to become the sixth largest economy in the EU once the UK has left.

A longstanding relationship has bound us together since the time when, as a young civil servant in the Romanian Ministry of Agriculture, Dacian was in charge of monitoring the decentralized development cooperation project in the Argeș region, which I had launched in 1996 as President of the General Council of Savoie.

In 2007, we both ended up, as agriculture ministers for our respective countries, tasked with securing a reform of the Common Agricultural Policy which would only be concluded in the early hours of a lengthy night of negotiations which the British were trying their best to derail.

Naturally, after this I closely followed Dacian’s candidacy for the post of European Commissioner, and his eventual appointment to the strategic post of agriculture.

Throughout those five years in the Barroso II Commission, our friendship and solidarity remained unwavering. As it did when I, along with Antonio Tajani and others, needed the support of the College to pass regulatory texts that offended the liberal or ultra-liberal sensibilities of certain colleagues and senior officials – which was the case with my proposal to establish access for all to a basic bank account in every country. And indeed, when he himself came up against the same ideological resistance to his 2010 proposal for a mechanism to enable farmers to finally come together to negotiate their prices with industrialists!

Mr Cioloș has invited us to dinner at a Romanian government residence, a former dacha away from the city centre. The ‘technical’ ministers he has gathered around him are politically astute and have good instincts.

The Romanian Minister of Labour, Dragoș Pîslaru, tells me: ‘We will be stronger in this negotiation if we’re really united. And this unity, this coherence, cannot be cemented by reactions or defensiveness alone . The twenty-seven must stand together, with a positive and proactive agenda, moving forward together and regaining the confidence of our citizens.’ At the end of these initial visits, the key elements we need for our negotiations are already falling into place.

‘We have allies among the twenty-seven, and we must make use of them. Our enemy is the Commission, which wants to be forgiven for making Cameron lose. Many of the twenty-seven need us.’

I am told that these remarks, which have been reported to me, were made yesterday in private before a group of businessmen in London by UK Trade Minister Liam Fox. This Scottish MP, a former defence minister for David Cameron and a former candidate for the Conservative leadership, losing to Theresa May, is obviously at the forefront when it comes to imagining the future of trade relations between the UK and the EU. But first of all, Brexit must be achieved, and he is in favour of a fast-track agenda. That, however, is no reason to propagate such untruths.

So it was the Commission that lost David Cameron the election? This is to pass over in silence, just a little too quickly, the ‘new settlement’ agreed with him at the European Council on 18–19 February 2016, in the midst of the migrant crisis – a settlement that further strengthened the UK’s special status within the Union. In the end it wasn’t enough to prevent Brexit, but not for lack of trying…

It is also to forget that, if all European leaders voluntarily kept silent throughout the referendum campaign, they did so at the express request of the British Prime Minister. According to him, any intervention by ‘Brussels technocrats’ or foreign leaders would have been immediately exploited by the ‘Brexiteers’…

In any case, Liam Fox’s statement only strengthens my determination: we must secure and consolidate the unity of the twenty-seven as rapidly as possible.

The foundation created by Jacques Delors celebrates its twentieth anniversary today! And so it is time for us to speak about ‘Notre Europe’ – an institute chaired by my friend Enrico Letta, former Prime Minister of Italy, and managed with great determination by a young Savoyard, Yves Bertoncini.

In his speech, Jean-Claude Juncker acknowledges that ‘the European Union must be ambitious on big projects and more modest on small matters’. Which is another way of saying that the lessons of Brexit are not just there for British citizens to draw from. And to be sure, Europe and Brussels have produced too many laws and regulations over the past thirty years, constraining citizens, consumers and businesses, and placing onerous obligations on their daily lives.