Brussels Last Supper: could Boris and Ursula von der Leyen succeed?

All may not yet be lost. According to the French news agency, AFP, there is still a chance that Boris Johnson and Ursula von der Leyen, the President of the European Commission, will agree a deal on trade when they meet tonight at the Last Ditch Café in Brussels.

And even if they don’t, the door will apparently remain ajar for several days more. Germany’s Angela Merkel, the current chair of the European Council, told the Bundestag yesterday that she could promise nothing and that acceptance by Johnson of the full integrity of the Single Market was an essential  pre-requisite to a deal. But – she seemed to imply – hope springs eternal, at least until the clock strikes midnight on December 31.

The position of Emmanuel Macron, as President of France, is en principe the same. How could it not be? If the UK prime minister caves in on fish, state support for industry and who gets to take charge of the governance of whatever is agreed, he will be only too happy to add his name to the relevant treaty.

For Johnson, on the other hand, attaching the De Pfeffel monicker to such a settlement would be a bit like signing his own death warrant. He needs to come away with something – anything, really – that makes it look as if compromise is still a two-way street.

On fish, especially, he is vulnerable. Having promised nothing short of a piscine Trafalgar, he cannot be seen to slouch home like Napoleon from Moscow.

But Macron, too, has much at stake. He is already under fire for all sorts of domestic reasons, ranging from his handling of the Covid lockdown and Islamist terrorism to the re-emergence of anarchist street violence and rogue police officers, and has only a certain amount of wriggle-room left to him. If he were a cat, he would probably have used up six of his nine lives, two behind Johnson.

But though Macron has promised much to the French fishing lobby, he has also prepared his fallback position rather more artfully than his British counterpart, who, should he fail, is left only with the option of parodying Henry V at Agincourt, summoning up the blood and lending his eye a terrible aspect.

The President last week sent his prime minister, Jean Castex, to Boulogne, France’s biggest fishing port, where he vowed that the Élysée would do everything possible to defend the national interest, but at the same time acknowledged that ground, and water, might have to be conceded to the English as the price of peace. I doubt the trawlermen were impressed. They want France to hold the line. 

But they are not stupid. They know that in the event of No Deal, the British, legally speaking, would hold the whip hand. In that event, their strategy would be to blockade France’s Channel ports pending the imposition of high tariffs on British fish landed in France and an assurance of handsome, EU-funded compensation for their lost livelihoods. Macron would happily acquiesce to both.

The two remaining obstacles to a settlement – the maintenance of regulatory equivalence, including the use of state aid, and who gets to resolve disputes when they arise – are markedly more arcane, of interest not to the French per se, but rather to those for whom the European Union is a secular religion, with the treaties as its holy writ. It’s not that they aren’t key issues on which everything could yet hang, it is more that they are for administrators and officials than for the fans on both sides watching the game.

Le Parisien, vaguely left-of-centre, reports today that the tone of what has been said so far this week has given little hope that the outstanding issues will be resolved. It quotes Nathalie Loiseau, a leading member of the European Parliament, who previously served as Macron’s minister for Europe, as saying that “profound differences” remain between the two sides.

Well, what else is new?

In the same paper, Catherine Mathieu, an economist with the independent think-tank OFCE, sums up the dilemma on fish by pointing to the fact that the British want to establish full control over UK waters while the French wish to continue to fish “exactly as before”.

Again, not exactly an eye-popping assessment, but one that brings to mind the obvious question: if Michel Barnier and David Frost and their teams of experts haven’t been able to arrive at a solution to the outstanding issues after four years of painstaking negotiation, what hope is there that a last-minute diner-à-deux can do the trick?

But we must look for hope where we can find it. The sacking of Dominic Cummings, the prime minister’s controversial top adviser on Europe, had, said Le Monde, veered between Shakespeare and a Feydeau farce, ending up as “bad Vaudeville”. That said,  Tuesday’s unexpected withdrawal of the clauses relating to trade between the UK mainland and Northern Ireland in the Internal Market Bill, represented an important step forward.

“By letting go of the Brexit ultras, Boris Johnson has given himself more leeway to reach a deal. For the UK and for Europe, the time has come to end, with as little damage as possible, the endless and poisonous Brexit divorce.”

That is one proposition that will attract little dissent. But what happens if Boris and Von der Leyen fail to make headway during their tête-à-tête? Angela Merkel and Emmanuel Macron have agreed that the EU summit taking place in Brussels tomorrow that was supposed either to endorse a settlement or else clear the decks for emergency action should instead find something else to talk about while awaiting – who knows? – the white smoke that could yet rise from the Berlaymont’s digital chimney.

Failing that, there has been talk, in the margins, of a further ad hoc extension to the transition period. What form this would take, nobody knows. The treaties are silent on the subject. Michel Barnier and David Frost could agree to stop the clock or, as in Orwell, allow it to continue until it strikes thirteen. Alternatively, they could keep on talking as far as eternity and beyond. This could happen, but somehow I doubt it. The patience of Europe is wearing extremely thin. 

EU leaders have much else to think about. And the British, for their part, are exhausted. The Covid vaccine is cheering them up; they don’t want to be dragged back into the Brexit time tunnel.

In the meantime, the Commission’s chefs are getting ready to serve what could be Brexit’s last supper. I’m guessing that Dover Sole will not be on the menu.