Endeavouring to put some self-righteous spin on a humiliating defeat, British Prime Minister David Cameron declared it “a bad day for Europe”. Whether or not that turns out to be true, it was a diabolical day for him. He was not absolutely Nobby Sans Mates when they voted on Jean-Claude Juncker. It was 26 against two after the Hungarian prime minister raised one other futile hand to object to making the Luxembourger the next president of the European Commission. Somehow, having one friend made Cameron’s isolation look even worse.
No previous British prime minister has suffered such a high-profile reverse in Europe. Never before have other heads of government overridden a leader of one of the biggest states when he had a fundamental objection to a senior appointment. There has been a tilt in power to the European parliament, which will have a say on any new terms for British membership that Cameron, if re-elected, might negotiate before the referendum he has promised for 2017. The Tory Europhobes are deliriously happy to see their leader crash and burn, citing his failure to stop the Luxembourger as evidence that the prime minister’s renegotiation strategy is doomed before he has even spelled out what he wants. His policy of investing all his hopes in German Chancellor Angela Merkel proved to be a spectacular flop when she deserted him. Rarely, if ever, has Britain suffered such a rout on so many fronts in Europe.
I write this as someone who agreed with Cameron about Jean-Claude Juncker. You do not have to be a swivel-eyed Europhobe to regard the uninspiring fixer from Luxembourg as a bad answer to the big questions facing Europe. I am with the prime minister in thinking that the notion that the European elections gave him a sort of “popular mandate” to be president of the commission is a nonsense. I believe Cameron when he intimates that many of his fellow European leaders have been two-faced: Privately disparaging the Luxembourger as a lousy choice, but then nominating him anyway.
All that makes this defeat the more dire. He had sound arguments both about the principle of the process and the person being pushed for the job. There was little love for the Luxembourger even among other Eurocrats. The prime minister ought to have had allies among his peer group. And yet still he lost. Not only lost, but ended up in a minority of two.
The genesis of this defeat can be traced back to 2005 when he was running for the Tory leadership. He threw a bone to the right of his party by saying he would take the Conservatives out of the European People’s Party (EPP). A few wise voices cautioned that exiling the Tories from the main centre-right grouping in Europe would cause trouble down the line. The leader of the German Christian Democrats, one Mrs Merkel, was baffled and cross. It set a pattern that has since been repeated of Cameron throwing chunks of meat off the back of his sledge to try to sate the pursuing pack of Europhobic Tory beasts. Leaving the EPP not only excluded him from the group’s formal decision-making, it also cut him out of the less formal encounters where deals are made and alliances are struck. Had the Conservatives been in the EPP, it is quite likely they could have stopped the Juncker juggernaut before its engine was even running.
For that failure of foresight all those years ago, Cameron at least has some sort of excuse that he was young, naive and desperate to win his party’s leadership. After four years of being prime minister, there is no alibi for failing to prepare properly for this battle and then conducting it in a self-harming fashion.
Cameron is often quite a supple deal-maker at home. In Europe, egged on by the backbenchers who he so often seeks to appease, he has been hopelessly crude. It is hard to disagree with the critique of his negotiating skills by the Polish Foreign Minister, Radoslaw Sikorski. The Pole is an anglophile and a great admirer of Margaret Thatcher. He went to Oxford where, just like the prime minister, he was a member of the Bullingdon Club. In a private conversation leaked to the Polish press, Sikorski observed of Cameron: “He f****d up ... His whole strategy of feeding scraps just to satisfy them [Europhobic Tories] is, just as I predicted, turning against him.”
What the language lacks in diplomatic nicety it gains in pungent summary of why Cameron has alienated European countries that ought to be naturally sympathetic to him and to Britain. Nick Clegg has repeatedly despaired to colleagues that his Tory coalition partners are “totally tone deaf when it comes to talking to the rest of Europe”, with the result that “they are loathed in foreign capitals”.
Clegg agreed with all of Cameron’s objections to Juncker. The deputy prime minister deployed his contacts and linguistic skills to help with the fight. I am told he made “endless calls” around Europe trying to find allies for Britain. More than once, Clegg warned Cameron to mind his language. It was counter-productive to attack the Luxembourger in a personal and vitriolic manner and just as foolish to melodramatically cast Britain as glorying in isolation. Supporters of Juncker turned Cameron’s noisy campaign against the prime minister by making it an issue not of whether the Luxembourger was fit for the job, but whether Europe was going to surrender to bullying and blackmail threats by its most truculent member.
The critical actor in Cameron’s failure was his supposed greatest friend, Merkel. Once she declared that Juncker was her candidate, it was the effective death of Cameron’s strategy. The leaders of Holland and Sweden swallowed their own doubts and fell into line behind Merkel because, in the words of one senior official: “They didn’t want to be on the wrong side of Germany.” Though Cameron was still talking gamely about forming a blocking minority, well-placed observers report that he already sensed that the game was up by the time of the “rowing boat” summit in Sweden three weeks ago.
There are two main interpretations as to why it ended in a debacle. One is that Cameron misread the German chancellor from the start. He thought he had promises from her that she was just as determined to stop Juncker, but it turned out that something got lost in translation between the two of them.
The other version of events, and this is the one related by Number 10, is that Merkel has badly let down Cameron. She told him some months ago that she shared all his doubts about the Luxembourger and gave firm private assurances that a way would be found to block him. There was then a pro-Juncker, anti-British backlash in the German media and from within her own coalition. Merkel buckled, flip-flopped and embraced Juncker as her candidate. Though the Lib Dems despair of the Tory approach towards Europe, on this occasion, one of their most senior cabinet members expresses a sliver of sympathy for the prime minister. “No one could have predicted that Merkel would just turn on a sixpence when she encountered domestic resistance.”
Whichever of these interpretations you favour — I am rather persuaded by the second one — neither augurs well for Cameron when it comes to a renegotiation. He has predicated the success of that enterprise almost entirely on his relationship with Merkel. He has piled up all his chips on Frau Merkel. He has assumed that she would help him package up a renegotiation with enough “concessions” to Britain to allow him to recommend a ‘yes’ vote in a referendum.
Crucially, he has also assumed that she can deliver everyone else to a deal as well. Some of us have been warning for some time that he has staked too much on Merkel. Yes, she is a highly-skilled politician. Yes, she is the most powerful woman in Europe. Yes, she would like Britain to remain within the European Union (EU). But she is subject to her own domestic pressures — she is not where she is without being ruthlessly protective of her interests and she will not make huge sacrifices of her own political capital just to help Britain.
There are many lessons from this debacle for the Tory leader. One is — and this he really should have guessed already — that Merkel cares more about her own political skin than she does about Cameron’s hide. If he cannot block a poorly regarded former prime minister of a very small country who has a notorious weakness for fermented fruit in liquid form, how is Cameron going to succeed in his self-defined and much more challenging ambition of keeping Britain in the EU after a renegotiation of the terms of membership?
That is not a bad question just because it is being most gleefully asked by joyful Europhobes.
— Guardian News & Media Ltd
