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The last, agonizing hours of negotiating the deal almost ruined Christmas for everyone involved, but its political reception in Britain has been beyond what British Prime Minister Boris Johnson could have wished for.
With Labor leader Keir Starmer promising that the party will vote for him, there is no chance of rejection in next week’s House of Commons vote.
But Johnson wants his deal to be celebrated by his own supporters like the Brexit they voted for in 2016 and all signs are that he will succeed.
Conservative-supporting newspapers, including the Sun and the Daily Mail, welcomed the deal before it was agreed, hailing it as a triumph for Johnson.
Newspapers of all stripes have published glowing accounts of David Frost’s negotiating style, with identical quotes about how he outwitted Michel Barnier by presenting the same proposal in various different ways, such as Diet Coke and Coke Zero, in what they call “the Coca-Cola maneuver “.
Frost is reported to have characterized the EU’s negotiating style as oscillating between that of a monster and that of a cranky teenager, and characterized his predecessor Olly Robbins as a mouse.
“He gave us a grid of four squares of different negotiator modes: teen, tank, mouse, and leader,” the Times quotes a high-ranking member of his team. “He told us that the EU tends towards the first two and the UK has too often been a mouse. We needed to be the leader in the room and rise above things. ”
Johnson’s message on Christmas Eve to his fellow Brexiters, particularly hardliners at his conservative banks, was that his deal was completely different from the deals proposed by Theresa May. His would have effectively kept Britain in the EU customs union and dynamically aligned with the single market rule book.
No paper for the ECJ
The new deal gives Britain regulatory autonomy, but if it chooses to diverge from EU standards, it could see taxes on some of its exports. Fundamentally for true Brexit believers, the Court of Justice of the European Communities will have no role in arbitrating disputes.
While Nigel Farage announced that “the war is over” and that Brexit had already been achieved, one of the most interesting moments of Johnson’s press conference was when he rejected the characterization of Britain’s relationship with the EU as a war. .
“The EU was and is an extraordinary concept, and it was born out of the throes of WWII and was founded by idealistic people in France, Germany and Italy who never wanted those countries to go to war again. In many ways it was and is a noble undertaking, ”he said.
Johnson suggested that, freed from its “very dense integration program”, Britain will be the EU’s strongest ally and a trusted partner with shared goals and values.
Such a partnership may be possible in the future, but the agreement reached on Christmas Eve also creates opportunities for future disagreements and conflicts, as demonstrated by Switzerland’s relationship with the EU.
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