Boris Johnson’s dinner from hell

Boris Johnson has spent more time talking with Brussels bigwigs this week than at any time since he became Prime Minister. Two lengthy phone-calls with the Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen and then a hastily arranged dinner with her and the EU chief negotiator, Michel Barnier.

Thirty years ago, Johnson wrote a famous story which the Daily Telegraph’s editor, Sir Max Hasting, splashed on the front page revealing his Brussels’ correspondent “scoop” that the Commission building, the Berlaymont was about to be demolished.

This week he was seen entering and leaving the very same building and allowing an endless sequence of unflattering photographs of his belly bursting out of an over-tight suit presumably bought when he was on the diet his friend, Carrie Symonds, imposed on him briefly.

David Frost who I remember as a trim-looking man when he worked for me when I was Europe Minster before he became a Lord was also exposing a Falstaffian mid-riff developed out of solidarity with his boss.

By contrast Ursula von der Leyen, the most Anglophile Commission President since Roy Jenkins, looked slender and fit, as did Michel Barnier, who still hikes or skis his beloved Alps in Savoie, the French region where he was elected a French deputy five years after Joe Biden entered the Senate when Boris Johnson was still at prep school.

The top floor of the Berlaymont is one big restaurant chain. There are dining rooms of all sizes to carry out political business. Fish is usually on the menu as it is a safe bland choice.

The rest of Europe is genuinely puzzled by Johnson’s obsession with fish. Until the 1970s Britain not only had a three-mile fishing waters limit but insisted – to the point of fighting and losing three cod wars with Iceland – that no country should be allowed to extend its territorial waters for fishing.

President Macron faces a difficult re-election in May 2022. The recent death of Valéry Giscard d’Estaing who managed only one term as a liberal reforming French president without a real party base is the fate that haunts Macron.

A handful of French fishing boats can close down all cross-Channel traffic by blockading entry into harbours for ferry boats bringing 85 per cent of Britain’s fresh food. French fishing boat owners have real political muscle. Even so, Macron has told French fishing communities their catch will go down but via Michel Barnier he has been begging Johnson to let this happen in a controlled way over a number of years.

Yet according to high-level Fianna Fail sources in Dublin, Johnson’s opening bid was to tell Ursula von der Leyen that Barnier was the main impediment to a deal. After the four principals met, other senior officials joined for dinner, so the top floor at the Berlaymont was buzzing with stories, some of which leaked out particularly from the gabby Irish, who took pleasure in seeing someone they hold in the lowest regard making a fool of himself.

When I went with Tony Blair to these meetings he was briefed to the most minute detail by diplomats and officials who knew Brussels as well if not better than Whitehall. Moreover, Blair and his ministers, like Margaret Thatcher in her day, had good bilateral connections with their political clan’s opposite number in other capitals.

This seems to have disappeared from UK politics. Tory MPs have lost all contact with fellow centre-rightists in Europe and an inward-looking Labour has given up working the European account.

The Guardian today denounces Johnson as a “liar” about most things European which, argues the paper, costs him credit with EU presidents and prime ministers. His utterly untrue front-page story about the Berlaymont being demolished, all those years ago, is a case in point. The “liar” jibe has much validity. In his biography of Churchill, Johnson writes of a “Gestapo-controlled Nazi EU” which is childish as well as untrue.

However, Evelyn Waugh’s classic Scoop about journalists inventing stories is not much read in translation but Johnson’s 30 years of fabulations on the EU should be seen in that light. He is in the tradition of Italy’s Beppe Grillo telling the EU to “Vaffa” (Go f*** yourself) or Jean-Marie Le Pen who raised laughs and jeers at giant rallies by denouncing the “Federasts” of Brussels out to do down France.

Even now, at the last minute of the last hour of any hope of arriving at a compromise deal, the culture secretary, Oliver Dowden, was on Radio 4’s Today saying German car manufacturers would surely realise that giving in to Johnson’s demands was in their interests.

Has he not seen the Volkswagen advertisements offering to absorb all no-deal Brexit related tariffs for three years? German carmakers are treating Brexit as a marketing opportunity. It is hard to believe that a British cabinet could be so ill-informed about European realities.

His unhappy dinner in Brussels should surely have made clear to the Prime Minister that there is no one in Brussels or any EU capital that can do his lifting for him. He either plunges on with no-deal, like Anthony Eden at Suez, or he makes a major Commons statement and national broadcast to declare that the art of the British compromise can still be found in the political-diplomatic tool box of Whitehall. We will find out soon enough.

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