From hope to farce in the Austrian hills

The European Union’s Salzburg summit was, we were led to believe by both sides in the Brexit negotiation, going to be the breakthrough moment. The Austrian hills would be alive with the sound of compromise and goodwill.

There would be a coming together on agreed, if more than somewhat fudged, terms for the divorce and a move towards constructive talks on EU-UK trade relations after the UK’s exit from the club. Mr Tusk would be happy and Ms May would be relieved and fit for a few rounds with her party’s Brexit fundamentalists. Ms Merkel could go back to worrying about her fragile hold on power and the outbreak of right-wing violence in Germany, leaving Mr Macron free to resume his master’s on re-making the European project. Mr Juncker could pass around the celebratory brandy.

What went wrong? How was a gathering so crucial to the future of this island and to trade and employment across almost an entire continent turned into demeaning farce by people — politicians, diplomats, policy advisors — who claim to know better than the rest of us?

Britain’s prime minister, it’s now clear, misread the runes, just as she did last year when she was encouraged by advisors to call a general election that lost her a working House of Commons majority and left her dependent, at a cost of €1.1bn, on life support controlled by the Democratic Unionists. It isn’t difficult to see why many Conservative MPs, on both sides of the Brexit divide, fear that she’s been promoted beyond the reach of her talents.

She set the tone in Salzburg by telling the 27 that her Chequers offer was unamendable and the only one on the table. That was taken by the European Commission and heads of government as the ultimatum it was. So much, then, for the sound of music.

Having indicated in the run-up to the summit that there were parts of the Chequers paper that were in fact promising, the commission and the other heads of government — even the eurosceptic ones in southern and eastern Europe — responded to Ms May’s take-it-or-leave-it pitch by leaving it. Thanks, but no thanks was the right reply.

But what, afterwards, possessed the president of the European Council — an experienced politician — to add personal humiliation to the business-like rejection of unsatisfactory offer? Since when has an Instagram picture with a pointed joke at Ms May’s expense about cherry-picking been a tool in the EU’s diplomatic kitbag? If it was Mr Tusk’s intention to lose friends and influence people in Britain, he has succeeded, as has France’s Mr Macron, who did his bit in lowering the tone by calling the UK’s Brexiteers liars.

But after all of this second-rate theatre, the substance of the dispute remains unchanged. The EU 27, quite properly, will agree to nothing that runs the risk of either fracturing the single market or recreating a physical border on this island, while no British government committed to delivering as best it can on the 2016 referendum result is able to contemplate a customs border that excludes the North from the UK’s single market. Both sides must move, with London and Brussels resuming work on the Chequers proposals, and the EU 27 accepting that there will be no second referendum in the UK.

In any event, Mr Tusk’s Instagram jokes would probably increase the leave vote.