Michel Barnier: pen-pushing fanatic or master negotiator?

Like a Cardinal sent by papal decree to persuade a heretical movement to return to the true faith, Michel Barnier has spent the last four years opposing Brexit, while working to ensure that its influence does not spread throughout the wider European Union.

In medieval Europe heretics posed a serious threat to the Church. When peaceful means of dealing with them were exhausted, direct action was invariably the next step, beginning with threats and excommunication, and ending in slaughter.

Barnier – who bears a resemblance to the retired Benedict XVI – does not incline towards casual slaughter. The son of a craftsman, he was raised in the town of La Tronche, in the foothills of the Alps. In 1970, having secured his baccalaureate, he won a place at the prestigious École Supérieure de Commerce de Paris, France’s leading business school.

In his twenties he pursued a course that would be very familiar to his British peers in all parties by working as an adviser to various Gaullist and neo-Gaullist government ministers before winning election to the National Assembly. A keen skier, married by now with three young children, he helped organise the 1992 Winter Olympics. He was rewarded by Jacques Chirac, who appointed him Minister for the Environment and then Minister for European Affairs.

From then on one promotion followed another, with increasingly Brussels-focused briefs. He served two terms as a European Commissioner, first with responsibility for regional policy from 1999 to 2004, and then from 2010 to 2014 for the internal market.

Today, aged 69, he sees himself as an emissary of all that is right and progressive in Europe. He is a fonctionnaire to his immaculately manicured fingertips, yet also an enforcer. When push comes to shove, he will do what he thinks is necessary to isolate the sinner and purge the sin.

He could have been Pope himself, of course. In 2014, having served briefly as French foreign minister, he was among the favourites to succeed the Portuguese José Manuel Barroso as Commission President. But fortune did not smile on him and he was forced to acknowledge fealty to the Luxemburger Jean-Claude Juncker, who hailed from a country with a population less than half that of his own home department of Isère.

Eighteen months later, in the wake of the Britain’s 2016 referendum, Juncker was obliged to appoint someone with the right political weight and experience to take the lead role in negotiations with London. It was an opportunity to shine. But the reality, as it turned out, was the application of gloss to a poisoned chalice.

There was no way short of a revocation of Britain’s Article 50 notification that the EU was not going to emerge smaller and less influential in the world. Barnier was thus doomed from the start. Though for two years he maintained the fiction that somehow Brexit was a bad dream from which both sides could yet awaken, he always knew that mitigation and damage control were the most he could hope for.

In the meantime, having been largely unknown outside of Brussels, and to some extent, Paris, he became a household name across the continent, most obviously in Britain. Here, with baleful inevitability, he was cast as a scheming Frenchman out to do down the Old Enemy while masquerading as an honest broker.

When Barnier turned up in the Berlaymont Building in Brussels for the first time in the autumn of 2016, it was clear that he meant business. His team came voluminously equipped with files and documents. On the opposite side of the table the newly appointed Secretary of State for Exiting the European Union, David Davis, offered nothing beyond a toothy smile and the apparent conviction that all would be done and dusted by Christmas. Barnier was going to work; Davis was going to lunch.

This was when the breakdown began. Appointed by a prematurely weary Theresa May, Davis was the wrong man in the wrong place, albeit at the only available time. He had boasted that the UK held all the cards and that the negotiations in which he was nominally engaged were about no more than giving legal expression to London’s version of how the spoils would be divided. May didn’t help by repeating her twin mantras that “Brexit means Brexit” and “No deal is better than a bad deal.”

Barnier was not impressed by any of this. In his heavily accented English he pointed out remorselessly that No Deal would mean Britain effectively being excluded from full access to European markets. Moreover, he said, a price had to be paid for walking out of the club. No progress could be made in any other area until the scale of the debt had been agreed. Davis huffed and puffed, but got nowhere.

The result was a fateful sequencing which at a stroke put the British at a grave disadvantage. Sovereignty and free access to the single market played second fiddle to the question of how much the UK exchequer would pay – £39 billion, as it happened – before moving on to the substance of the talks.

After that, there would no recovery. Davis and his lacklustre squad were fired and replaced by a succession of nonentities up to and including Theresa May herself. Barnier, it transpired, was no figurehead; he was the real deal, a master negotiator.

Soon afterwards Theresa May, in hock to Northern Ireland’s ten DUP MPs following her disastrous 2017 general election performance, found herself embroiled in a hopeless battle to prevent the implementation of the so-called “Irish Backstop”.

In the interests of avoiding chaos on the Irish border, Barnier insisted that Northern Ireland should, in trade terms, become a virtual protectorate of the EU. To the DUP, this smacked of betrayal. May was flummoxed. Not knowing how to proceed and with the bulk of the Conservative Party in open rebellion, she resigned.

Boris Johnson moved into Downing Street, presenting himself as the DUP’s unwavering champion. At the subsequent general election – the third in less than five years – he emerged victorious, with a majority of 80, and days later, having no further reliance on the DUP, signed up to a deal almost identical to May’s, with what was effectively the original Northern Ireland-only backstop.

Two-nil to Barnier. By now, the message was plain for all to hear: tick-tock, tick-tock – if you wanted to get things done, Brussels Rules were the only game in town.

The Political Declaration and Withdrawal Agreement signed by Johnson were hailed by Downing Street as significantly different to the draft previously agreed by May. The truth is, the Withdrawal Agreement (other than the Northern Ireland Protocol) is identical, and the Political Declaration is extremely similar.

As a consequence, when Britain formally left the EU on January 31, the stage was set for yet more mutual incomprehension. Johnson argued that the two sides were back at the starting gate, with everything up for grabs.  Barnier retorted that the documents signed by the British were specific in their meaning and bound the UK to the principle of a “level playing field”.

And that is where the two sides stand today. Barnier expects the UK to abide by EU standards if it wishes to have access to the Single Market. Johnson says “no”: Britain will do as it pleases, he says, and if Europe doesn’t like it, then No Deal is back on the table.

For the patrician Frenchman, this is unacceptable. His entire political life has played out against the backdrop of Brussels and the doctrine of ever closer union. Brexit is the ultimate violation of his most deeply held beliefs. For Johnson, who has no deeply held beliefs, every day is different. What you say today can be unsaid tomorrow. So long as Theresa May was prime minister, Barnier could deal with British exceptionalism. With Boris Johnson in charge, he stands for the first time at risk of losing the initiative.

There are many on the English side of the Channel who think of Barnier as anti-British. In particular, it was suspected that he envied London’s role as Europe’s banker and wished to transfer many of the City’s functions to Paris. In fact, as a French patriot, he rather likes and admires the island race. He just wonders where they have gone, and why. He has known several generations of UK politicians down the years and, for the most part, rated them highly – as he did the many Whitehall civil servants and diplomats with whom he had to deal.

His issue is less with the British world view, which will have struck him as essentially Gaullist in nature, but with the Tories’ abandonment – to him inexplicable – of the collegiality and shared ambition that underpins the European project.

His task now is to wade once more into the morass of British demands, with the difference that the tick-tock this time around is sounding from the opposite side of the table. To Barnier an extension of the transition period is logical and necessary, especially in light of the impact of the Covid-19 crisis. To his opponent, all that matters is victory, which means either capitulation by the EU or a No Deal with his name on it.

Unless Johnson gives way at the last second (which, as we know, cannot be ruled out), the only recourse will be to detailed damage limitation. This will  mean a series of hastily cobbled-together small agreements that, for a time at least, would keep the show on the road.

To Barnier, brought up on the Code Napoleon, such an outcome is anathema. It simply makes no sense to him. But the British should beware. He is not easily cornered. He knows that the EU is by far the bigger of the two parties to the current talks. He also knows that the Johnson government has been enfeebled by its shambolic handling of the coronavirus crisis and can only afford to push chaos theory so far. Finally, he believes with every fibre of his being that No Deal would be disastrous for both sides and, accordingly, will work tirelessly to prevent it.

Expect maximum pressure and a closing of the ranks in the weeks ahead, led by Angela Merkel and Emmanuel Macron. Barnier is not afraid to compromise. Just in the last seven days he has said that the role of the European Court of Justice in adjudicating competition standards might possibly be reduced, or even eliminated. But though he may bend, he will not break. The time, as the Spanish like to say, of the last cartridges, may be upon us.