[ad_1]
Visibly flustered and decidedly nervous, the Prime Minister was pacing back and forth in his Downing Street study when the cell phone in his suit pocket began to vibrate.
“It’s Frosty,” he yelled to the handful of officials gathered in his office.
It was 2:15 p.m. on Christmas Eve and the newly ennobled David Frost, the EU’s top negotiator in the UK, was on the line.
More than 25 hours had passed since a historic trade agreement was reached “in principle” with Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Commission. And then the waiting went on … and on … and on …
The dream of a deal before Christmas was fading fast and No Deal was still a possibility.
But now a broad smile spread across Boris’s face. Whatever Frost is saying, the prime minister liked it. “Make the deal, Frosty,” he said calmly.
Barely able to suppress his euphoria, he ordered that a Zoom call be set up in the cabinet room with von der Leyen, who was flanked by Frost and Michel Barnier, the EU’s top negotiator.
Who ordered anchovies? The pizzas arrive at the Berlaymont building in Brussels on Wednesday as the talks dragged on into the night.
In London were some of the people who had been working around the clock, including Boris’s chief of staff, Sir Eddie Lister, his chief private secretary, Martin Reynolds, and James Slack, chief communications officer.
When the EC president confirmed that the agreement had been signed, there was an explosion of applause in the Cabinet Room.
“It was a tremendously emotional moment,” said a source close to the British negotiating team.
Boris returned to his office to put the finishing touches on his statement at the press conference, which he delivered in a herringbone shirt and carefully selected tie, sporting a delicate fish motif.
On his desk, alongside the 1,500 pages of the deal’s text, was a strategically placed can of pale ale brewed by the oldest brewery in the northeast of England: Camerons.
The late-night pizzas (pictured) that helped seal the Brussels deal on Christmas Eve
“It was a clear nod to the Red Wall seats that Boris won in the elections by promising to ‘End Brexit,'” said a senior conservative.
But some jokes suggested that it was actually an excavation against former Prime Minister David Cameron, who had held an in-and-out referendum.
Whatever the truth, a year after Johnson’s landslide victory in the general election, this trade deal, the model for how the UK and the EU will trade after breaking ties since we joined the Common Market in 1973, It was truly a landmark moment in the last four years of great Brexit drama.
The lack of agreement on the terms could have left Britain and the EU in a bitter confrontation, with devastating economic consequences for both.
While much of the conversations revolved around state aid issues and disputes over resolution mechanisms, they were nearly sunk by the politically tense but economically marginal fish issue. The fish and shellfish trade accounts for a minuscule 0.1% of British GDP, but in the coastal towns and villages on both sides of the English Channel it became a totemically important issue.
Much of the credit will deservedly go to Lord Frost, 55 (Boris calls him ‘The Great Frost’) and his team.
Frost, unlike his predecessor Olly Robbins, a fervent Europhile and favorite of then-Prime Minister Theresa May who passionately believed Brexit was a mistake, was a Leaver through and through. A former career diplomat, he became a hard-line Eurosceptic while working in Brussels in the early 1990s, dismayed by the excesses of the Eurocracy. He left the Foreign Office in 2013, but Boris courted him, as a former Brussels correspondent, Boris knew Frost of yesteryear, when he became Foreign Secretary in 2016.
During the final round of talks, Frost, a medieval French Oxford scholar whose team wore Union Flag-branded laces, lived up to the ‘Frosty’ name.
Earning with pints: beer
Not only did he describe his negotiating style, but, in the last days of the talks, it was a fitting metaphor for his state of mind with EU counterparts.
At first, he devised a ‘four-box grid’ to describe the negotiating styles: Teen, Tank, Mouse, and Leader. Frost said the EU favored the first two, while the UK had been the Mouse under Theresa May.
According to one of the team members, “he reminded us that we had to be the leader in the room … they told us to be polite but robust.”
There was certainly no love lost between Frost and Barnier.
Frost’s habit of referring in conversation to the EU as “his organization” irritated the irritable Barnier, who replied: “You ask for respect for your sovereignty. Please respect ours.” A British source said: ‘Barnier did not accept that we were being robust, he complained that we were being aggressive.
‘We were not aggressive, we were direct. It’s fair to say that Frosty and Barnier will not keep in touch. They didn’t really like each other. But when the story is written, I suspect we will find that many of the EU leaders had lost all faith in Barnier. “
It was in the last ten days that Boris Johnson and von der Leyen became personally involved and, among other issues, resolved a dispute over components for electric cars that will become a major export and domestic market for the Nissan and Toyota plants in the UK.
The fishing problem was more difficult to solve. The couple spoke a dozen times on the phone, four times on Wednesday alone.
While Boris Johnson is known for ignoring details, here it was in the fine print, having promised that he would never “sell” our trawlers. A real sign of progress came this week when Stephanie Riso, von der Leyen’s senior adviser, began attending the talks.
On Tuesday night, Riso called Frost and told him that the EU would drop its long-standing demand to be able to impose new tariffs on the UK if it imposed restrictions on access to fishing waters. In EU speech, it is known as cross retaliation.
In one of the many crisp calls between the prime minister and von der Leyen, he told her: ‘Viel hummer, kein hammer’ – German for ‘a lot of lobster, no hammer’. The European president has always referred to the EU’s desire to apply cross-retaliatory tariffs as the “hammer.”
In return, Boris pledged to accept a 25 percent reduction in EU fishing with a transition period of five and a half years.
David Frost was jubilant over the fall of the EU and telephoned his officials, some of whom were already back at the hotel packing their bags to go home for Christmas. They returned to work and by Wednesday afternoon an agreement in principle had been reached. Boris Johnson was seen punching the air in conversation with von der Leyen during a Zoom call on Wednesday afternoon. But even then, problems were brewing as both sides got bogged down in a dispute over ‘pelagic’ fish.
Inshore pelagic fish include anchovies and sardines, while oceanic pelagic fish are swordfish, tuna, and mackerel. It was a numbers game, splicing and dividing quotas and trying to agree on a police mechanism to reassure French, Belgian, Danish and Dutch fishermen.
It was the fact that fishing quotas were measured in financial terms, not tonnage, that led to the disagreement. A senior source said: ‘We thought the deal would be announced at 7pm on Wednesday so we got little sleep in London that night. In Brussels they did not sleep at all.
Prime Minister Boris Johnson in a call to the President of the European Commission, Ursula von der Leyen
As one member of the British delegation noted sourly: ‘Oceanic pelagic fish also include sharks, which all seemed to be on the water side of the EU. We looked at mackerel spreadsheets for hours. I swear some of us will never eat fish again.
As the evening progressed, a pizza delivery appeared for the weary officials, sparking some excitement, although for regular observers it had been an all too common sight over the years.
On the 13th floor of the Berlaymont building, the headquarters of the European Commission, von der Leyen took control. Putting Barnier aside altogether, he telephoned EU leaders and kept Johnson on speed dial, while his officials spoke directly to EU states with strong fishing interests like France and the Netherlands.
It was a huge boost to morale for the British team. Barnier was losing both sides of the room. “There were voices raised on their side, not ours,” the official added.
Before Barnier was pushed aside, frustration had been mounting over the seemingly intractable dispute over mackerel. Some members of the British delegation, exhausted and afraid they would not be home for Christmas, burst into tears. “ It was like pulling my eyelashes one by one. It’s painful but everything has to be so precise, “said one.
They had tried to cheer up the spirits by sending private WhatsApp messages about various EU officials they had to deal with. They also became fond of singing songs from Les Miserables. His favorite? One more day, which summarized how the talks were going on.
The chorus includes the lyrics: “Raise the flag of freedom … there is a new world to win.”
It later emerged that the EU had used incorrect figures to calculate which pelagic fish EU vessels might land in British waters. The deal was quick after that.
When the deal was signed, the two teams had spent a total of more than 2,000 hours locked in rooms with little or no natural light in London and Brussels. They started sharing vitamin D tablets.
But that’s all history now. The triumphant British team has replaced that Les Mis favorite with a song from another musical: Hamilton’s The Room Where It Happens.
There was no one else in the room where it happened. Nobody really knows how the game is played. The art of the trade. How the sausage is made. And, of course, “how to do Brexit”.
