‘Cynical to get power’: Michel Barnier on Boris Johnson, Brexit and the EU’s future

A couple of years ago, Michel Barnier spent a weekend with Boris Johnson’s father, Stanley. It was not some ghoulish Brexit spin-off of The Traitors, but the result of the former EU negotiator’s wife, Isabelle, being a close friend of Johnson’s French cousin, Anne du Boucheron, the owner of Château de la Baronnière, a 19th-century estate in Mauges-sur-Loire, in western France. “We spent a weekend together in a French castle. Very friendly. Long promenades in the forest,” Barnier recalls of Johnson senior, with whom he discussed the former prime minister’s motivation to back Brexit. “It was interesting. Boris was much more European at the beginning. Even if he was critical. I don’t see it as a motivation but it is, perhaps, a method or attitude: to be pragmatic in some way. Cynical. Cynical to get power.” Emphasising his points with a gentle thump of the table in a splendid meeting room in the National Assembly, where he now represents a Paris constituency, Barnier follows up his anecdote with fresh evidence of his fondness for a bon mot . To “the clock is ticking”, “no spirit of revenge”, “no cherrypicking”, add: “Never sacrifice the future to the present.” A decade ago, Barnier was asked by the then European Commission president, Jean-Claude Juncker, to lead the EU’s negotiating team after the Brexit referendum. …