Michel Barnier: the Gaullist who tried to teach UK a lesson or two

France’s new prime minister was darling of Remainers for his courteous but ruthless Brexit negotiations

Michel Barnier, France’s new prime minister, was determined to teach Britain a lesson during the Brexit negotiations.
The EU’s chief negotiator never missed a chance to school his rebellious Anglo-Saxon pupils on their error of leaving the bloc.
“We intend to teach people,” he said back in 2017 at the start of the Brexit talks, “what leaving the single market means”.
The Gaullist negotiated with no fewer than four British Brexit secretaries in a two-year stint from 2017 to November 2019, when Jean-Claude Juncker stepped down.
The tone was set early on at his first official meeting with David Davis, then Brexit secretary, in July 2017.
The European Commission tweeted a photo of Mr Barnier and two senior officials sitting opposite Mr Davis and his team. The Europeans had bulky folders on the desk in front of them, Mr Davis and company had apparently neglected to bring notes or even a notebook. The message was clear; only one side had done their homework and it wasn’t the British.
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Mr Barnier cultivated an air of wearied professorial patience in the years of lectures that followed.
When Boris Johnson, then foreign secretary, said the EU could “go whistle” over its Brexit bill demands, the man from Savoie moved to restore discipline. “I am not hearing any whistling, just a clock ticking,” he scolded in 2017.
The Brussels schoolmaster’s clock was always ticking while he taught his lessons by rote. Brexit was a “lose-lose”,  he would recite, a “zero sum game”.
There could be no “cherry-picking”, Mr Barnier would intone as he repeated again and again the rules of EU membership in hundreds of press conferences.
Colour-coded charts and a “ladder” diagram showing different trading relationships on offer to Britain were deployed by Mr Barnier to make his point.
At one point, the British team started bringing out their own charts to counter the EU messaging in what was swiftly dubbed “slide wars”.
But the man with a PhD in Brexit had already won the argument and was giving Britain the third degree.
Mr Barnier’s lessons were swallowed without question in Brussels and hailed as Moses-like evident truths by the most zealous fringes of the Remainer community in Britain.
“No one has ever managed to explain to me the added value of Brexit,” Mr Barnier often mused as Europe sat at his feet, “not even Nigel Farage”. Mr Farage, the naughtiest of bad influences, was famously summoned to Mr Barnier’s office for a chat.
According to Mr Barnier, Mr Farage told him cheekily that other member states would copy Brexit Britain and leave. “These people want to destroy the EU,” Mr Barnier told reporters in Brussels.
Mr Barnier cultivated a calm, unflappable exterior. He unfailingly insisted he “respected” Britain’s sovereign decision to leave the EU, before listing the reasons why it was a massive error.
Only Lord Frost seemed to have the knack of getting under Mr Barnier’s skin. Otherwise, he was unfailingly courteous, even once telling the “Britpack” of British reporters in Brussels “I don’t really eat croissants and I prefer an English breakfast”.
“Mr Barnier is, as you would expect, extraordinarily charming,” staunch Brexiteer Jacob Rees-Mogg said outside commission headquarters after meeting the Frenchman in Brussels in 2018.
The lithe Frenchman would often explain, at length, that as a young man in 1970s France, his first vote was to support Britain joining the EEC, the forerunner of the modern EU.
However,  he also named Charles de Gaulle, the president who twice vetoed UK membership of the bloc, as his political hero.
And he never forgot that he was dubbed the “most dangerous man in Europe” in Britain after being named the commissioner for financial regulation and planning a cap on bankers’ bonuses.
Mr Barnier, 73, insists to this day that he was not looking to punish Britain for Brexit or for revenge. But there is no doubt he wanted to make an example of the UK to ensure continental eurosceptics didn’t follow Britain out of the bloc.
During the Brexit years, he toured the EU’s capitals; congratulating them (and himself) on their remarkable unity against the British.
He was greeted with standing ovations from Dublin to Denmark after speeches packed with EU theology such as single market access being conditional on accepting free movement.
Mr Barnier had achieved something very rare for an EU commissioner – he had become a household name across Europe, if not necessarily in his native France.
It was only after he left the commission and ran for French president in 2022 that he blotted his copybook.
The man from the Alps first became a French deputy for the centre-Right Republicans aged just 27, entering government for the first time in the mid 1990s under Jacques Chirac.
But, a man whose longevity is such that some call him the French Joe Biden, needed to grab France’s attention after spending 15 years as a commissioner in Brussels.
As the politician took over from the professor, Mr Barnier dismayed his admirers in Brussels by declaring France should not, in certain circumstances, be subject to the European Court of Justice or the European Court of Human Rights.
He demanded a crackdown on immigration and found himself accused of tearing pages from Mr Farage’s playbook.
To make matters worse, he failed to get the nomination from his beloved Republicans, which went on to post disastrous results in the presidential election.
Until today, Mr Barnier looked destined for the political wilderness, being wheeled out as a pundit on British political chat shows, plugging his “secret diary” of the Brexit negotiations.
The diary was called “La Grande Illusion” in France, which makes clear his view of Brexit has not changed, despite his flirtations with euroscepticism.
In an interview with The Telegraph earlier this year, he told Sir Keir Starmer the EU’s red lines of free movement hadn’t changed, amid Labour’s calls for a renegotiation of the Brexit agreements.
His comeback won’t have a direct impact on French policy towards the UK, as foreign policy is a presidential responsibility. Mr Macron is perfectly capable of being tough on Britain without Mr Barnier’s help.
Emmanuel Macron is mired in a mess of his own making. After being handed a drubbing in European elections in June at the hands of Marine Le Pen’s National Rally, he called snap assembly elections.
Before the vote, the French centre-Left, greens and hard-Left patched up their differences to form the New Popular Front group to keep the hard-Right from power.
In the first round, Ms Le Pen’s party made big gains. In the second, Mr Macron’s centrist camp and the New Popular Front stood down candidates in a pact to keep National Rally from forming a new government.
When the votes were counted,the New Popular Front was the largest faction but short of a majority in a hung parliament.
National Rally was the largest single party but also did not have an assembly majority. Mr Barnier’s Republicans were nowhere near a majority and neither were Mr Macron’s centrists.
Mr Macron rejected the Left’s choice of Prime Minister. Mr Barnier emerged as a figure his party and the Republicans could accept.
It is thought the president could have a deal with the eurosceptic National Rally not to bring down the new Right-leaning government with a vote of no confidence.
Ms Le Pen’s party is making the most of the leverage already and saying it will wait and see the new government programme before deciding on its next move. Mr Barnier will hope his tough talk on immigration will be enough to ensure his immediate survival.
It helps that everyone knows he will not contest the next presidential elections in 2027.
The new prime minister will need all his powers to survive in post in the deeply polarised world of French politics. Earlier this year, he accused Ms Le Pen, who once called for a Frexit referendum, of not having learnt “the lessons of Brexit”.
Now, in the case of a pupil becoming the master, Ms Le Pen has the power to decide how long he remains as prime minister.