Just over a year ago, en route home from a summer break in France, we dropped in on Michel Barnier. Don’t worry, we had been invited!
It was a real pleasure to spend some time with him and his wife, Isabelle, and members of their family at their home in the Loire Valley. We walked a bit, we talked a lot, we had a very nice dinner, at the end of which, on learning I had my bagpipes in the car (I always do, and rarely need to be asked twice to get them out for a blow) three generations of Barniers asked me to play.
He and Isabelle had been rhapsodising about their holiday in Skye, so I played Over The Sea To Skye, then a couple of traditional Highland tunes, before closing with Ode to Joy, the European anthem which I had taken to playing at People’s Vote events aimed at securing a referendum on the final Brexit deal. Cheesy, but it had to be done and, staying as he does within a single octave – which is all we pipers have – Beethoven could frankly have written Ode to Joy for the bagpipes. The Barniers must have liked it, because they asked me to play again in the morning.
Fiona had been a bit anxious about the visit, largely because of the sometimes unpredictable behaviour of our dogs. Whereas I had met Barnier a few times, and found him much warmer than his rather stiff and austere public image, her sense of him was very much formed from the media portrayal of his role as the EU’s main Brexit negotiator, not exactly a position that allowed him to show a cheerful or cuddly side.
She found him absolutely charming, his wife glamorous but also very down to earth, warm and welcoming, including to the dogs.
After breakfast, he was keen to show me his office, and for all that the UK media like to focus purely on his Brexit role, photos and souvenirs underlined that there is so much more to him than that. Elected as a member of the National Assembly aged just 27, he held several cabinet positions, in addition to his various senior roles in the European Commission, culminating with the Brexit job. But the photos that seemed to arouse the most emotion in him related to the role he played in securing and organising the 1992 Winter Olympics for Albertville, in the Alps where he was born. That was clearly a real passion project.
We chatted over his memories of working for Jacques Chirac, his own short-lived effort to run for president himself, and of course his take on the various characters he had to deal with over Brexit. He respected Theresa May, felt she was a sincere and principled woman destroyed by vain and ambitious men. His attitudes to public service could not be more different to Boris Johnson’s, yet even in the privacy of his own home, he sought not to be too personal. Fear not, dear reader, I did enough of that for both of us.
He was polite and diplomatic about president Macron, without coming over as much of a fan. Moving forward to this year, I doubt he would have been hugely surprised, given Macron’s belief in big bold moves (like starting a new party in 2016 and becoming president within 13 months), that his reaction to disappointing European elections topped by the far right Rassemblement National was to call a snap general election; unsurprised too that it failed to deliver the political clarity Macron hoped it would.
But if I had suggested during those pleasant chats in the Loire that this time next year Macron would be asking Barnier to become his prime minister, then he might have worried for my sanity; and vice versa had he suggested it about himself.
Strange times. Strange things happen. He wasn’t the first choice. But when it was made, it struck me as perhaps being more obvious than some of those who had been sounded out and declined or been rejected. He is polite and respectful, even to people who don’t deserve it. He has enormous patience. He is consensual, and likes to build teams. He pays attention to detail, and is a good reader of people. He will need all that and more in the coming weeks.
And his role as Brexit negotiator, successfully keeping 27 EU governments in the same place while dealing with the dysfunction of the UK’s ever-changing personnel and positions, and comprehensively out-negotiating them, is not bad training for the Rubik’s Cube political landscape that the French people delivered in Macron’s snap election. On verra.
“Brexit means Brexit,” Mrs May famously declared, since when we have often wondered what “Brexit means Brexit” meant, and indeed what Brexit means.
When speaking English, Michel Barnier always calls it “the Brexit”. That is because in French, Brexit was deemed worthy of its own definite article. “Le Brexit”. So … “Quant au Brexit, c’est une catastrophe,” (as for Brexit, it’s a disaster), or “les effets du Brexit sont affreux”, (the effects of Brexit are dreadful).
How different might history have been had Mrs May gone for the French version rather than the English, in which “The Brexit means the Brexit” would have sounded even more ridiculous?
Last week I was interviewed by Ryan Tubridy for the Irish broadcaster’s podcast on books. One of the questions was about the title of an as-yet unwritten book I might write. I should have gone with “La Mort du Brexit”. A story that must be told, hopefully in my lifetime.
What do Keir Starmer, far right French leader Marine Le Pen and Björn Höcke of the far right Alternative für Deutschland have in common? The answer is that they all won around a third of the vote in, respectively, the UK general election, the first round of the French National Assembly elections, and the recent state elections in Thuringia.
The reward for Starmer was a landslide win, and a huge majority for Labour. For Le Pen, it was the left and the centre uniting to prevent her doing as well in the second round, and keeping her out of power, though Barnier’s appointment was in part made with her, and the votes she can command in the Assembly, in mind. For Höcke, it was every other party making clear they would not give the AfD the support they need to form a coalition government.
I blow hot and cold on proportional representation. In recent weeks, I have probably been blowing a bit cold.
I have loved the Paralympics, and well done Channel 4 both for the breadth and the quality of the coverage from Paris. It was an incredible success story for Paralympics GB to come second behind only China in the medals table. There is no doubt London 2012 – slogan “Inspire a Generation”, remember – played a role in that success. A highlight for me was Ellie Simmonds commentating on the double gold medal triumph of swimmer Maisie Summers-Newton, for whom Simmonds’ success in London had indeed inspired her to think she could do the same.
But the big factor was the funding from the national lottery, something virtually every GB gold medallist mentioned in their often moving post-event interviews. Arise Sir John Major. Legacy takes many forms, and more than three decades on, the lottery is a part of his, still delivering.
