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

View image in fullscreen ‘Cynical to get power’: Michel Barnier on Boris Johnson, Brexit and the EU’s future Former negotiator believes in an unstable world, it is ‘perfectly possible’ the UK can rejoin the EU with old opt-outs UK could keep special pre-Brexit terms if it rejoined EU, Michel Barnier says 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. He navigated four years of fraught talks, a list of negotiating counterparts lengthy enough to grace a pub quiz question – David Davis, Dominic Raab, Steve Barclay, David Frost, for the uninitiated – and a stream of meetings in his offices on the fifth floor of the EU’s Berlaymont headquarters in Brussels with the various political agitators of the time. View image in fullscreen Michel Barnier served as the EU’s chief Brexit negotiator and twice as a European commissioner. Photograph: Magali Delporte/The Guardian There was Tony Blair (“I never thought that there would be a second referendum,” Barnier insists) and Nigel Farage (“This guy with the help of Mr [Steve] Bannon, the help of the Russians wants to destroy the EU – never, no way”). He also hosted that “more radical group” in the Conservative party, he recalls, grasping for the name of the guerrilla Brexiters who made such trouble for Theresa May. “The ERG [European Research Group], yes,” he says after a little help. “Great times,” says Barnier with a wistful smile. Each to their own, perhaps. Few would now argue that great times followed Britain’s exit of the EU – something Barnier is happy to make a point of. “The great lie was to say that everything was due to Brussels,” he says, noting the UK’s weak economic growth and increasingly toxic immigration debate. “Mr Farage is still