Brexit Deal agreed ( updated )

September 24, 2021

1 minute ago, periodictabledancer said:

How can you put fuel in a car that doesn't need it ?

Don't need to fill because they are not going to be using the car, they could have waited, didn't need filled up today.

Edited September 24, 2021 by Jambo-Jimbo

September 24, 2021

What a summation from the man who won the deal.

https://apple.news/AdDbhWfVeQxOz6owDzmFmSQ

My Secret Brexit Diary by Michel Barnier review — ‘I still don’t understand what the point of Brexit is’

The EU’s chief negotiator gives his account of wrangling with “exasperating” Brits and Boris Johnson’s “madman strategy”. Review by Charles Bremner

September 23 2021, The Times

On the day Britain finally left the EU, Michel Barnier, the Frenchman who led the European negotiations to unravel more than four decades of British membership, admitted that he did not get it. “I still don’t understand what the point of it is, even from the perspective of the British national interest,” he wrote.

Barnier’s view of Brexit in January 2020 as irrational and self-damaging, an opinion shared by the continental establishment, had not changed over the four years of tortuous wrangling that led to the withdrawal and the trade pact last Christmas. Yet there is admiration for Britain in Barnier’s Secret Brexit Diary, a blow-by-blow account of the marathon dance that he performed with a succession of British ministers and two prime ministers, all of whose behaviour he found exasperating. Ending his inside tale of the divorce, subtitled A Glorious Illusion, Barnier wishes the best for “a great people” who have given much to the world. He also predicts that les Anglais will soon be back to their usual tricks and trying to undermine their deal.

Far from the tabloid caricature of Barnier as a hardline Anglophobe, his diary portrays him as a fair-minded broker and steady hand who put himself in British shoes and was bent on a deal. “Keep calm and negotiate” was inscribed on mugs in his office. In the face of walkout threats from emotional Britons, he repeatedly pulled the talks back from the brink.

Barnier, 70, a former conservative foreign minister and European commissioner, was a good choice by Jean-Claude Juncker, the Commission president in 2016. A politician long known as thorough, courteous and a little dull, he cultivated the support of the member states, visiting everyone from the Baltics to Ireland and Malta, ensuring he thwarted Britain’s non-stop campaign to split the front of the 27.

A master of detail, Barnier is impressed by the “dignified, competent and lucid” British civil servants, led by Olly Robbins, Theresa May’s adviser and Brexit negotiator. He is amazed by the insouciance of the politician negotiators, from David Davis through Dominic Raab to David Frost. Though Davis refused to engage in detail, he liked him. He was startled by Raab’s “messianic glow in the eye” and incredulous when the Briton said he had only just discovered that “we are particularly reliant on the Dover-Calais crossing”. Relations with Lord Frost ended poorly after the “masquerade” of Britain’s endgame last winter with squabbling over fishing and rules for the “level playing field” in trade.

At the outset Barnier is astounded by the way that May lays down British red lines, thus closing doors. Yet he admires her as a courageous, “strong and elegant woman but with a certain rigidity in her physical and mental attitude”. He adds: “As I greet her, I can’t help but glance at her shoes . . . her zebra and leopard print pumps.” He rather likes Boris Johnson but finds him frivolous, unbriefed and almost unhinged when he adopts a “madman strategy” in the closing phase of the trade negotiations, walking away, saying Britain would be happy with no deal. To understand Britain’s aversion to Brussels, Barnier says he began by reading The Commissioner, a 1987 novel by Stanley Johnson, the prime minister’s father.

The big frustration for Barnier and Sabine Weyand, his German deputy until 2019,was what he calls the refusal of British leaders to assume the consequences of a referendum that the “morally outrageous” Brexiteers never thought through. There was a failure to grasp everything from the economic damage to the implications for Ireland and the Good Friday agreement, he writes.

While bickering over the Irish backstop in late 2018, he writes: “It is now almost two and a half years since a majority of British people voted for Brexit under the leadership of politicians like Dominic Raab and every passing day shows that they have not realised the consequences of what is truly at stake here.”

The chaotic British conduct stemmed from the way the government failed to grasp that it held few cards while Brussels held most of them. When Davis likened the negotiation to buying a house, Barnier corrected him. “It is not a question of bargaining” because Europe was selling nothing.

Until the end, the British tried to cherry-pick from the single market and the customs union while insisting on independence from EU rules, Barnier says. On fish, the sole area in which Britain held an advantage, the Brussels team deployed figures to scotch Johnson’s demand to exclude EU boats from its plentiful waters. All by itself, the connection to continental electricity that Britain wanted was worth up to two billion euros a year, far more than the value of all the fish that Europeans catch in British waters, Barnier told Frost. “There is no reason why you should get access to our electricity market and at the same time deny our fishermen access to your waters.”

He clinched the final deal thanks to unerring support from Europe’s leaders, including Chancellor Angela Merkel, Mark Rutte of the Netherlands and Ursula von der Leyen, the new Commission president. Merkel telephoned Barnier in his car with encouragement for the final sessions. Emmanuel Macron also helped to make sure there was no EU wobble in the face of les Anglais.

The journals of Adrian Mole or Mr Pooter come to mind with the bland digressions that the ever polite Barnier makes about his grandchildren, chers collègues and his wanderings around Europe. Stockholm, he tells us, is “a beautiful cold but sunny city in the heart of Sweden”. In a preface to the English translation, Barnier blames the 2016 vote on delusions of British superiority and contempt for the EU fed by decades of press denigration. Britain’s departure was a big loss and a failure for the EU as well as Britain, he says.

The Savoy-born politician who was always deemed an outsider by the Paris elite, remains a believer in the European project but he acknowledges flaws in a machine run by bureaucrats who have often lost touch with the people. The EU has discredited itself lately by failing to protect citizens from the rigours of globalisation and control the flow of migrants across its external borders, he says.

These are the themes that Barnier has surprisingly struck up this month in his campaign for the Republican Party’s candidacy for April’s presidential elections. Barnier’s old sparring partners across the Channel must be amused to see this champion of EU orthodoxy now promising to put French sovereignty above the rulings of the European Court of Justice.