Inside the Deal — how Brexit got done

The EU, not Boris Johnson, got Brexit done. That is both the provocative subtitle of and the recurring theme in Stefaan De Rynck’s account of Brexit.

De Rynck, an adviser to the EU’s chief Brexit negotiator Michel Barnier, takes us on a painful tour through the negotiations between Brussels and London, from the confused early days in the aftermath of the 2016 referendum to the final deal on Christmas Eve 2020.

If you’re looking for a vivid page-turner, Inside the Deal is not for you. De Rynck’s book mirrors the European Commission’s style in the Brexit negotiations — dry, but also methodological and knowledgeable. As such, it’s an important contribution, giving a clear insight into the EU’s thinking during a historically significant episode, whether we agree or disagree with Brussels’ approach.

Predictably, De Rynck devotes much of his focus to the confusion that haunted the UK’s negotiation position, starting with the absence of any significant preparation for what London wanted the deal and process to actually look like. As a result, the EU’s insistence on a withdrawal agreement first and a trade deal later won, enabling Brussels to control both the process and clock from the outset.

By eliminating alternative paths of creative, and wider, strategic thinking, did the EU’s initial hard line not also create a higher-than-necessary cost for the bloc itself?

De Rynck recounts skittish British brainstorming of options for life outside the EU — the Monaco model, the Liechtenstein model, “a reverse Ukraine agreement”. He is scathing of the model that Theresa May eventually landed on following a highly charged cabinet meeting at Chequers, the UK prime minister’s country residence, in July 2018 that saw two senior ministers resign. “Full sovereignty . . . but also frictionless trade”, which, in the author’s view, committed the cardinal EU sins of “cherry-picking” and, in a nod to Boris Johnson’s celebration of the possibilities of both having one’s cake and eating it, “cakeism”.

The author describes the bafflement over May’s pushing of a vision that inevitably neither the EU nor her Conservative party could accept, culminating in defeats in parliament and ultimately her resignation. The EU of 27 proved more united than the UK of one.

De Rynck is more generous towards Johnson, half crediting him with dropping cakeism. And it’s true that the UK improved its grasp of the process during the talks on the future relationship, though it also asked for a lot less in the negotiations. But, he says, even under Johnson, who succeeded May in July 2019, the UK “was inching towards the EU one step at a time”. He lists dozens of UK concessions in the final deal, against three from the EU (fish, foreign policy and the name). That interpretation is unfair on the UK, which got more concessions than that (level playing field and state aid spring to mind).

The book presents a bingo card of classic Brussels criticisms of London. The UK “misunderstood the EU”, “miscalculated Merkel” and so on. Some of these are fair but the author at times slips into caricature. As ever, the charge can also be reversed: the EU failed to understand both the UK and why Brexit happened (which was twice confirmed democratically — in 2016 and then the general election of 2019).

De Rynck is at his most interesting when describing the backroom conversations that have received less coverage: such as Philip Hammond, the then UK chancellor, asking what labour market mobility, one of the thorniest issues of Brexit, “would buy” Britain; or a US official asking (allegedly) in exasperation how the EU “could deal with these people”.

On the EU’s and commission’s performance, De Rynck is unsurprisingly very complimentary. Appointing Barnier “was a masterstroke” by commission president Jean-Claude Juncker: the veteran French minister and European official managed to keep the EU united and heads cool, while Westminster descended into chaos.

Similarly, De Rynck defends the commission against a number of charges, most notably that it did not understand Northern Ireland or the forces that could be unleashed by trampling on existing settlements there. He says Northern Ireland “is primarily the business of the UK” and that Brussels “took a risk” by making the province subject to EU customs rules and regulations even inside the UK.

That version doesn’t quite align with the EU’s approach at the time. This is the same commission that rushed out a text in 2018, inserting Northern Ireland into a proposed EU legal arrangement, which the two sides then spent 18 months trying to understand and square with businesses and political parties in Belfast. Someone who fully understood the risk and implications should have acted differently.

It is also hard to reconcile De Rynck’s argument that Brussels basically got its approach right from the start with the revised Northern Ireland deal, which Rishi Sunak, UK prime minister, managed to agree with EU earlier this month, reflecting many lessons learnt on both sides.

The failure to clearly see the longer-term impact of smaller tactical choices points to a wider story. Yes, it’s undeniably the case that the EU achieved its main strategic objectives as De Rynck defines them: to protect the bloc’s coherence and unity while avoiding any political “contagion” (there is less talk of Swexit or Frexit these days). But by eliminating alternative paths of creative, and wider, strategic thinking, did the EU’s initial hard line not also create a higher-than-necessary cost for the bloc itself — economically, politically and geopolitically?

With a European war to the east, an increasingly protectionist America to the west and continued instability to the south, is it really serving Europe’s strategic bottom line to have one of its two real military powers and the world’s fifth-largest economy floating somewhere mid-Atlantic? Or perhaps, taking the longer term view of its neighbourhood, the EU hasn’t got the balance of its own strategic trade-offs completely right? Here, De Rynck leaves us guessing.

Inside the Deal: How the EU Got Brexit Done by Stefaan De Rynck, Agenda £25, 288 pages

Mats Persson is a business adviser, and was special adviser (2015-16) to David Cameron, UK prime minister and chief of staff to the UK chancellor (2019-2020)

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