“Szanowny Donald. It was so nice to see you last month. I’m sorry it has taken so long for me to write, but I have been very busy, what with everything going a bit wrong at home over tax credits. Anyway I am finally in a position to make clear my extremely firm demands about how I would quite like the European Union to be if you are all happy with it.
- Can everyone be a bit nicer to Britain and not exclude us from trade deals?
- Please don’t let the European parliament make us drive on the right-hand side of the road.
- Can you stop so many of your fellow Poles from coming to Britain and flooding our supermarkets with cheap lager?
- Can we not be quite so close as we used to be, but remain very good friends?
That’s about it. Obviously these extremely firm demands are entirely negotiable, but if you could try to make it look as if I have won some important concessions before agreeing to things that are almost totally uncontentious, that would be a big help.
Lots of love,
Dave
PS: Sam sends you her regards.”
On receiving the prime minister’s long-awaited letter, the first reaction of Donald Tusk, the president of the European council, was one of relief. Relief that the letter was a great deal shorter than the speech Cameron had delivered at Chatham House, the headquarters of the Royal Institute of International Affairs, earlier in the day. Even if the content had been almost entirely the same. The less Dave has to say, the more inclined he is to repeat himself at length. Though he prefers to think of it as being solemnly flexible.
“We are now entering the formal phase of our renegotiations,” said Dave, hanging on to his favourite wooden lectern for dear life. The formal phase appears to be almost identical to the informal phase. The harder the scanned his script for some minor substantive detail about what might be non-negotiable, the less he could find.
“Let me explain,” he continued, more anxious than ever to explain almost nothing. “We Brits have always been an open trading nation and we don’t want to change that, apart from the bits we do, but we aren’t sure what they are yet in case the EU says no, which wouldn’t look very good for me, I mean us.”
“Let me explain,” Dave repeated, desperately hoping to lull his audience into a zen-like trance. If only he could just keep this speech going for another couple of years, the referendum would be as good as in the bag.
“Let me explain.” He didn’t explain before finally realising to his horror that he had actually explained something when he let slip that foreigners were going to be made to wait four years before they could be paid benefits.
Somewhere in Brussels, Tusk could be seen miming a throat being slit. “Hang on a moment, chaps,” Dave reverse-ferreted. “When I said foreigners would have to wait four years, what I really meant was that they wouldn’t necessarily have to wait at all. It could be four years, it could be four days. What matters is that we achieve our negotiating objectives in a flexible way. Let me be very clear, I am ruling absolutely nothing out.” Except backing the Leave Europe campaign.
The EU negotiations were not about what was good for him, the prime minister concluded, they were about what was best for the British people. To judge by the reaction in Commons when the Europe minister, David Lidington, later made a statement on the contents of Cameron’s letter, the Tory Eurosceptic MPs actually reckoned the negotiations were mostly about them. “Is that it?” asked a red-faced Bernard Jenkin. Certainly looks as if it’s shaping up that way, Bernie.
