Two Crisis Phone Calls Unlocked the ‘Impossible’ Brexit Deal
For three years, the EU had insisted that no British prime minister could negotiate directly with any other European leader.
It was 8 a.m. on Oct. 8 and long-serving officials in Downing Street were watching a diplomatic disaster unfold.
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson had been jolted by Chancellor Angela Merkel’s assessment of just how difficult it would be to reach a Brexit agreement and the blunt exchange that followed left advisers on both sides shocked.
Whether it really was the Merkel ambush the British described, or simply the moment the penny dropped for Johnson -- as the Germans suggested -- the vicious blame game it triggered almost meant the end of the negotiations.
Yet nine days after the U.K. team concluded a deal was “essentially impossible,” they were chatting with the prime minister over a late breakfast of sausage and bacon rolls as their government jet flew toward Brussels. Boris Johnson was going to seal a Brexit deal.
It was that bruising exchange with the German leader that unlocked the deal. And the concessions it triggered could yet prove the agreement’s undoing.
This account of the fraught final chapter of Johnson’s efforts to secure a divorce from the European Union is based on the accounts of officials from the EU and the U.K. who asked not to be named discussing sensitive recent events.
As Merkel’s team reeled at the ferocity of the British attacks and pro-Brexit campaigners tweeted an offensive image of Merkel, Johnson reached out to another leader with almost as much at stake in the Brexit talks: Ireland’s Leo Varadkar.
Speaking by phone a few hours after Johnson’s exchange with Merkel, the two men decided to take matters into their own hands. They would meet somewhere on neutral territory in a bid to break the impasse.
For three years, the EU had insisted that no British prime minister could negotiate directly with any other European leader. All talks were channeled through the European Commission in Brussels.
But Johnson and Varadkar decided it was time to break the rules. And that’s what broke the deadlock.
Walk in the Park
Thornton Manor is a 19th century country house surrounded by tranquil parkland and gardens, 225 miles from Downing Street. A wedding venue for the rich and famous, it was the place where on Thursday Oct. 10 Johnson convinced Varadkar to do a deal.
The two men and their teams talked for almost three hours. At one point the leaders took a stroll around the grounds of the estate alone. Crucially, they came to believe that they could trust each other.
On that basis, the pair thrashed out the broad shape of the deal that Johnson has now sealed in Brussels. It required them both to make compromises.
Johnson told Varadkar he accepted the need to avoid customs checks anywhere near the U.K.’s land border with Ireland and that would mean controls within the U.K. -- between Northern Ireland and the British mainland.
That was a totemic issue for the British side: It ran against everything they had been arguing for two years. Johnson’s predecessor Theresa May said no U.K. prime minister could ever sign up to it.
In exchange, Varadkar had his own gamble to take.
Varadkar’s Gamble
He’d refused to contemplate anything less than a permanent guarantee that the Irish border would be free of goods checks. Now, he let Johnson know, he was willing to move.
So the idea emerged of a tailor-made customs arrangement for Northern Ireland which the people of the region could exit after four years if their assembly voted to.
That was the crucial trade.
Speaking afterward, they said they’d found a “pathway” to a potential deal, but warned that a lot of work would be needed to get it done in time for the Oct. 17 summit.
British and EU negotiators stepped up the pace of talks at once.
They worked through the weekend and by Tuesday hopes were rising. The two teams worked from 9.30 a.m. until 1.30 a.m the next morning to finalize the text, fueled by sandwiches and salad and later coffee and biscuits.
Another Battle
Yet for all the progress in Brussels, Johnson and his team had another battle on their hands in London.
They needed to persuade the Democratic Unionist Party -- the Northern Irish grouping who support Johnson’s government in the House of Commons – to back the deal.
Anything that splits their region from the British mainland would be seen as a catastrophe by the DUP and without their support, Johnson would struggle to ratify his deal in Parliament. But without the custom’s compromise, there would be no deal at all and the entire Brexit project would be in jeopardy.
The DUP did not reject the proposals immediately.
In fact, as the legal text took shape this week, some in No. 10 thought that DUP leader Arlene Foster was ready to sign up to it.
When they met in Downing Street on Wednesday night, though, Johnson and Foster were too far apart for the divide to be bridged.
Final Push
Johnson woke early the next day. So did Foster.
At 6:48 a.m. she and her colleague Nigel Dodds issued a media statement. “As things stand, we could not support what is being suggested,” they said.
The door was still ajar for a compromise. But Johnson had run out of time.
He decided to go ahead without them.
At 9 a.m. he ironed out the final details in a call with European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker. Then he held a conference call with key cabinet ministers, before calling Juncker to tell him: they had a deal.
By 11 a.m., he was boarding a flight to Brussels.
At most recent EU summits, Theresa May was left to eat dinner alone while the other 27 leaders sat and discussed what to do about Brexit. At his first summit –- and possibly his last -- Johnson was allowed to sit at the table, with the divorce contract freshly sealed.
As soon as dinner was over, Johnson and his team headed back to London.
They have one more problem to solve.
--With assistance from John Follain, Patrick Donahue, Nikos Chrysoloras, Maria Tadeo and Lyubov Pronina.
To contact the reporters on this story: Tim Ross in Brussels at tross54@bloomberg.net;Ian Wishart in Brussels at iwishart@bloomberg.net;Kitty Donaldson in London at kdonaldson1@bloomberg.net;Dara Doyle in Dublin at ddoyle1@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Flavia Krause-Jackson at fjackson@bloomberg.net, Ben Sills, Rosalind Mathieson
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