(Bloomberg Opinion) -- Perhaps the biggest problem with Brexit is that a constantly changing lineup of British negotiators just won’t listen to what their European Union counterparts keep telling them over and over. Instead, they hope the EU will suddenly cave in to their demands at the 11th hour – because isn’t that what the EU always does?
In his just-published memoir, David Cameron, who as U.K. prime minister called the Brexit referendum and resigned after Britons voted to leave, reveals that he more or less started this tradition.
Excerpts from the book published by The Times describe Cameron’s interactions with EU leaders after the vote. “I spoke to European leaders and to Obama,” Cameron wrote. “To each I said the same thing: ‘I had a strategy to keep Britain in the EU. I executed the strategy. It didn’t work. I’m sorry.’”
But he really wasn’t sorry. Elsewhere in the memoir, “For the Record,” he wrote:
On the central question of whether it was right to renegotiate Britain’s relationship with the EU and give people the chance to have their say on it, my view remains that this was the right approach to take. I believe that, particularly with the Eurozone crisis, the organisation was changing before our very eyes, and our already precarious place in it was becoming harder to sustain. Renegotiating our position was my attempt to address that, and putting the outcome to a public vote was not just fair and not just overdue, but necessary and, I believe, ultimately inevitable.
This clearly means he failed to listen to German Chancellor Angela Merkel, a sympathetic and far more experienced colleague, when she cautioned him against his “strategy” long before the Brexit referendum. The portion of Stephan Kornelius’s authorized biography of Merkel, published in 2013, the year Cameron called for the referendum, makes stunning reading today.
Merkel, according to Kornelius, was fond of Cameron and generally an Anglophile; she didn’t resent Cameron’s desire for the U.K. to win back some of the sovereignty it had given up to the EU. On the other hand, she disliked the idea of renegotiating EU treaties, and was even more opposed to the idea of a referendum not linked to any such renegotiation.
“Her warning to Cameron was this: only if treaties had to be renegotiated could there be a vote for them,” Kornelius wrote. “And a vote was likely to turn out badly – of that Merkel was certain.”
Even then, Merkel worried about the possibility of the U.K.’s “accidental exit” and about Cameron overplaying his hand after misinterpreting her warnings. Kornelius wrote:
Merkel also had another fear: Cameron might misread her signals and take advantage of the hard line that she was adopting with the crisis-hit countries, as well as her sympathy for his demand for a repatriation of powers. If the British prime minister insisted too much on these demands, then ultimately she might be the only one who would be able to keep Britain in the EU. Cameron might exploit the fact that the Germans wanted to keep Britain in the EU at any cost, because it suited their interests. But Merkel doesn’t like veiled threats. If it reached that stage then she would decide whether the price was too high, and if in doubt she would decline.
Cameron knew all this as he was negotiating his February 2016 EU reform deal that preceded the referendum. He just believed Merkel would give him more concessions on the EU’s freedom of movement rules and other exceptions from EU treaties in order to keep the U.K. in the bloc. When the compromise she helped him get fell short of Brexiters’ expectations, he still went ahead with the referendum. Even when the vote didn’t go the way he’d hoped, he continued believing in a deal that would keep the U.K. in the common market without freedom of movement.
In his memoir, Cameron revealed that at his last European Council meeting on June 28, 2016, Merkel told him the hopes had been futile. “Angela Merkel assured me we wouldn’t have got any more in the renegotiation,” Cameron wrote. But he still didn’t believe the Europeans meant what they were saying, and accepted empty flattery from European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker.
“I saw Juncker on my own,” Cameron wrote in the memoir. “He was sad, but also effusive. He kept saying that the British Army was Europe’s best. That we had huge power in the world. That he and I were friends, and how sorry he was for me personally. He then said, ‘Of course, I’ve got to say ‘No big deal for Britain’, but I have to say these things to keep the European parliament happy. I want to try and make this work.’”
The subsequent British negotiators have inherited Cameron’s peculiar deafness to continental voices, and they passed it down the line as they changed. Current Prime Minister Boris Johnson, whom Cameron accuses in the memoir of adopting the Brexit cause to further his career without really believing in it, has a case of this deafness that’s at least as bad as Cameron’s own. It explains why he compares himself to the Incredible Hulk, the comic book monster superhero, much to the dismay of EU leaders. Listening isn’t the Hulk’s superpower.
A last-moment deal is only really possible if the Hulk shrinks back into the mild-mannered Bruce Banner, listens to what the other side is saying and suddenly proposes something acceptable, such as a customs border in the Irish Sea, for example. Otherwise Cameron’s history of irrational hope and failure is bound to repeat itself. I wouldn’t be surprised by that at all. Clearly, Cameron himself doesn’t understand where he went wrong.
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
Leonid Bershidsky is Bloomberg Opinion's Europe columnist. He was the founding editor of the Russian business daily Vedomosti and founded the opinion website Slon.ru.
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