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

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.

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 winning some elections but he has no longer the capacity to say the fault is in Brussels.”

Other scapegoats are available? “But not Brussels,” he responds with a little flash of steel. “It would not be fair to say that the problems of the UK today are due to Brexit, but what I am sure of is that all these problems are more difficult because of Brexit.”

It is not that Barnier is blind to the EU’s historical “mistakes”, he says. Too many directives and bureaucracy, he concedes, and not enough done to secure the bloc’s external borders. He is an admirer of the EU’s new policy of seven-day screenings for those arriving through irregular routes and expedited deportations, a package of policies that have had some making comparisons to Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown.

All this should have been done earlier, he says, but Britain was as complicit in this failure as the other 27 member states. “I still don’t understand why the UK, which always had a very strong influence, left rather than use its influence to correct the EU – it is for me incomprehensible.”

Barnier is also reluctant to accept that the EU made any particular missteps in the run-up to the referendum in 2016. It was Britain’s decision not to impose transitional controls on migration from eastern Europe when Poland (2004), Bulgaria and Romania (2007) joined the EU.

The then German chancellor Angela Merkel’s later rejection of David Cameron’s “emergency brake” was soundly based on concerns about the “unravelling of the unity and coherence of the EU and legitimacy of the single market”, he says.

The single market was the top priority for Barnier too during the Brexit talks as the UK sought to keep frictionless trade while ending the free movement of people. At the time, Barnier explained it in a rather technical way; that the four freedoms (of goods, capital, services and labour) were indivisible. Today, he is more political.

Barnier, not yet a presidential candidate for when Emmanuel Macron stands down, but doing a lot of campaigning and “hoping to be useful”, is speaking in the knowledge of a very real possibility that a far-right president could be elected next spring – whether Marine Le Pen or, should a legal ruling on her candidacy not go her way, Jordan Bardella, the 30-year-old president of her National Rally party.

“We can never give any kind of argument for Mrs Le Pen or Mr Bardella or Mr [Matteo] Salvini [in Italy] to ask for the same treatment: ‘Look at the UK, they have no consequence, they pay nothing, they are cherrypicking.’ Never, never. At that moment it is the end of the EU – and Mr Farage wins … If they destroy the EU, then every European country is lost.”

No flexibility even now on trade for Keir Starmer? “No,” he says. Brussels cannot “give any argument to the far right in France or elsewhere”.

Barnier was France’s prime minister for three months in 2024 before the National Rally and the leftwing New Popular Front voted to bring down his government. “I am now much more comprehending [of] Theresa May,” he says of the former prime minister’s parliamentary woes.

He is working to create a new body, a European Council for Defence and Security, that would include UK, Ukraine and Norway and the EU members. The governments could cooperate and jointly borrow to fund military projects as well as initiatives relating to artificial intelligence and other disruptive technologies.

A similar sort of defence cooperation had been agreed in a political declaration relating to Britain’s future relationship with the EU in 2019 which was ripped up by Johnson a few months later, Barnier says.

“I remember a dinner with Johnson and [the European Commission president] Ursula von der Leyen, and he tries a threat. He says: ‘OK, we are not going to find an agreement on trade and economy, it is a pity – but we can work together on external defence.’”

Barnier recalls he spoke up to remind Johnson that he had already ruled out such cooperation. “With a kind of natural cynicism he looks around at his team: ‘Who decided this?’ I don’t know if Mrs von der Leyen was an altar girl but I am not an altar boy – I used to be a long time ago. He decided this.”

Did he ever believe Johnson’s threat to leave without a deal? “Frankly speaking, no. And I was never impressed by …” Barnier turns to ask his aide to remind him of the name of Johnson’s negotiator, David Frost. He had forgotten Frost’s name? Barnier raises a gallic eyebrow, purses his lips and says nothing.

It has been claimed that should Britain rejoin the EU it would not be able to enjoy its previous special status, with opt-outs from the euro and the passport-free Schengen travel zone. Barnier disagrees. “It is perfectly possible,” he says. He is less definitive on the issue of Margaret Thatcher’s permanent budget rebate which reduced the UK’s financial contributions. “The DNA of the EU is solidarity,” he says.

Will the UK rejoin the EU in his lifetime? “I don’t know the length of my life,” says the 75-year-old. “I think day after day the British people will see in the current world that it is more dangerous, more fragile, more unstable, that we cannot be alone. It is true for France, it is true for Germany, it is true for everyone. Every day it will be more clear.”