Meet The Brexit Negotiators - David Davis and Michel Barnier

Meet the Brexit negotiators: David Davis and Michel Barnier https://www.ft.
com/content/e79a735c-2715-11e8-b27e-cc62a39d57a0
The frozen streets of Helsinki lie silent as the mercury plunges to -16C. But inside the British
embassy, the lights are burning. David Davis, the man leading Britain’s exit from the EU, is trying
to explain over loin of lamb and after-dinner cognac why Finland should help make Brexit a
success.
It is late February and laughter echoes round the early 20th-century residence, as the UK Brexit
secretary shoots the breeze with Timo Soini, the thick-set Finnish foreign minister.
Davis likes to think of himself as “a charming bastard”, which is perhaps just as well given the scale
of his mission. This is the latest leg of a whistle-stop European tour — 13 countries in the past two
months — to sell his idea of Brexit.
He and his boss, prime minister Theresa May, hope to persuade fellow EU leaders to cut an exit
deal that somehow combines the “control” sought by the Brexiters with the kind of market access
that Britain has enjoyed as an EU member for 45 years.
Next week, at a European summit in Brussels, deeply sceptical EU leaders will review the plan that
Davis and May have set out — a pick-and-mix Brexit that seeks maximum access to EU markets
with minimal obligations. So far, the EU is unimpressed. As Xavier Bettel, Luxembourg’s
premier, put it this month: “They were in with a load of opt-outs. Now they are out, and want a
load of opt-ins.”
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Meet the Brexit negotiators: David Davis and Michel Barnier https://www.ft.com/content/e79a735c-2715-11e8-b27e-cc62a39d57a0
Davis, a veteran Eurosceptic, needs a good deal. At the start of the Brexit process in 2016, he was
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favourite to succeed May in Downing Street but months of attritional negotiations and capitulation
have taken their toll. He now sees this as perhaps the last grand act of a wildly oscillating political
career. “This project is as important as almost anything I can think of,” he says. Noting the old
adage that all political careers end in failure, he says: “If I get this right, maybe that’s the time to
call it a day.”
Meanwhile, the man standing in Davis’s way is not happy. Michel Barnier, the EU’s austere chief
Brexit negotiator, is becoming visibly impatient. As Davis began his swing through the EU’s Nordic
countries, Barnier recently told ministers behind closed doors in Brussels: “I know he’s spending a
lot of time visiting you but I want David Davis to come to Brussels to negotiate.”
Barnier, 67, and Davis, 69, come at the negotiations from completely different political positions
and with completely different personal styles, but their fates are inextricably entwined. Davis needs
Barnier to help find compromises to smooth the path to his cherished Brexit.
Barnier also needs Davis — and a deal this autumn — to help propel him to the job he has long
coveted. It is an open secret in Brussels that Barnier hopes to become the next European
Commission president. A failure in the talks would be economically damaging for both sides and
would wreck his hopes of ending his own career on an unexpected high.
For the moment, Barnier’s job is to represent the EU’s remaining 27 member states in Brexit talks
and deliver an “orderly withdrawal” for Britain, while ensuring the country pays a price for leaving
the club. His direct team is relatively small — a tenth of the UK’s approximately 600-strong Brexit
department — but, like Davis, he acts as a political nerve centre, managing input from countless
officials, politicians and lobbyists.
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Despite all this, the contact between the two has been minimal. Davis may be a frequent figure in
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European capitals but, at the time of going to press, he had held no face-to-face negotiations in
Brussels with Barnier, his political counterpart, since last November. The awkward body language
when they do meet tells the story of two politicians divided by a common task.
“Davis, with his breezy self-confidence, sometimes finds it hard to connect with Barnier, who sticks
firmly to the rigorous principles of the EU’s legal order,” says Charles Grant, director of the Centre
for European Reform.
Yet there are curious similarities in the zigzagging careers of the two men. Both are mavericks
within their centre-right parties, both failed in previous leadership bids and both returned from the
political wilderness to the frontline in their mid-60s, for one last shot at the top. Pride and a touch
of petulance come easily to both. Neither are masters of detail, yet between them they have landed
responsibility for Brexit, the mother of all technical negotiations.
In the run-up to next week’s crucial summit, the FT Weekend Magazine was given rare access to
both Davis and Barnier, who spoke about their uneasy relationship and the negotiations that will
determine both the fate of Britain and their own political destinies.
Back in Helsinki, Davis is demonstrating some of the useful Finnish facts at his fingertips,
before moving on to stress the importance of maintaining strong economic ties between Finland
and Britain. If anyone is going to listen to his pitch for a smooth Brexit it is Soini: the former leader
of the populist Finns Party is a supporter of the unfashionable London football team Millwall FC
and once paid his own way to attend the annual conference of Davis’s Conservative party.
The bonhomie spills out into the entrance hall. Soini offers in vain to take Davis on a tour of
Helsinki’s heavy-metal clubs and presents him with an ice-hockey puck from the Winter Olympics.
But, as the foreign minister leaves, a draught of icy Finnish air enters the embassy and a cold
realism settles on the British delegation about the scale of the task ahead.
The Brexit secretary may be enthusiastic about leaving the EU but, on his tour around European
capitals, he has struggled to find interlocutors who think the project is anything other than mad at
worst or an unwelcome distraction at best. Davis says of his diplomatic missions across Europe
that: “We want to make sure they all know what their interest is in the sort of deal we’re talking
about.” In other words, he hopes the economic interests of the remaining member states in
securing a good trade deal with Britain will overcome Barnier’s dogged defence of the EU legal
order.
The moment of truth is approaching for Britain and for Davis himself. The problem that he keeps
running into is that while the likes of Soini might say they want an ambitious trade agreement, they
can — in the words of one British official — be rather “reticent” when faced by a powerful Berlin-
Paris-Brussels triangle, whose main objective is to protect the European project. Brexit, for most
EU members, is a second-order issue at best.
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This is not the first time the two negotiators have found themselves on opposite sides of the table.
Barnier and Davis have known each other since their days as Europe ministers in the 1990s, when
they moved between castles in Luxembourg and an ancient nunnery on the Sicilian coast as part of
a “reflection group” working on a new EU treaty. It was during this time that Davis’s
Euroscepticism took hold, as he bridled at plans to increase the powers of Brussels. He revelled in
his reputation as “Monsieur Non”. Barnier, on the other hand, went on to pursue a career that saw
him fully integrated into the European project, serving twice as a European commissioner in
Brussels.
“Michel is Michel,” says Davis. “He has a slightly rigid style, you can see that in his press
conferences. But he’s straightforward and honourable. He thinks of himself, I think — and I’m
putting words in his mouth — as European rather than French these days.”
The two men have played up their old camaraderie. But, in truth, neither remembers the other
much. In the 1990s, both spoke through interpreters: Davis says his limited French at the time is
now rusty while Barnier has since learnt decent English.
Even Davis’s attempts to wine and dine Barnier have been a touch maladroit. Barnier is not one for
small talk or feasting. He rises early, swims to keep fit and habitually eats plain fish and spinach.
His occasional tipple is a glass of (French) red. Invited by Davis to the British ambassador’s
mansion in Brussels for a working lunch last October, Barnier was duly served English sparkling
wine as an aperitif, and a heavy beef Wellington for the main course. “Don’t they know him by
now?” asked one puzzled Barnier aide.
Barnier has a spritely air when we meet in his modest fifth-floor office in the commission’s
Berlaymont headquarters, decorated with the customary EU flag. His mood turns more guarded
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when Davis is mentioned. “I’ve always been a patriot and a European, he has always been a patriot.
We have a cordial relationship because I like this guy, he’s always very direct. I have a good
personal relationship. But it is tough, not so easy.”
Earlier in the conversation, Barnier had suddenly leapt from his chair. “Look at this photograph,”
he says, beckoning us over to a picture on his office wall that has animated his entire career. “Look
at the respect between these two guys. They are two giants, two giants! Look at the respect.”
Pictured on the Elysée Palace steps is Charles de Gaulle, clasping the hand of Konrad Adenauer, a
French president and German chancellor forging an alliance against the odds in 1962, embodying
the spirit of postwar reconciliation that gave life to Europe’s great experiment in integration.
By Barnier’s telling — and he tells it a lot — he was 14

when he saw that image on television, sitting in a
comfortable but modest home in Albertville, a Savoie
town nestled in the French Alps. It was a political
awakening for the son of Jean, a local businessman
specialising in wooden cutlery boxes and Denise, a
Christian, socialist activist.
Barnier was also inspired by his mother’s response to

a searing family tragedy. Within a day of losing her
eight-year-old granddaughter — Barnier’s niece — in a car crash, she had established an
association against dangerous driving. “She was my example,” he says.
The Frenchman took to politics with an earnest zeal he carries to this day. By age 22, he had won a
local election, taking overnight trains from Paris to his constituency twice a week. By 27, he was the
youngest member of the French parliament. Before his 30s were over he had organised a Winter
Olympics in Albertville. By his mid-40s, he had served as environment minister and EU affairs
minister.
Where French politicians often need to invent their rural hinterland, Barnier was a man of the
highlands, a genuine montagnard — and cruelly lampooned for it by the Parisian elite. He has
straddled left and right, Gaullism and Europe, politics and administrative roles, taking on his
mother’s advice to “never be partisan”. “It is proof of weakness,” says Barnier. “Being in the middle
of the road means you are proud of your ideas.”
But above all, in the French political world, he is as sober as they come. Jean-Pierre Raffarin, a
former prime minister, recalls his 22-year-old friend at business school “with the seriousness of a
35-year-old”. “Jean-Pierre often says I have not enough humour,” Barnier notes. “But it’s
important, [at] my age, to keep a margin for progress.”
In style and mindset, Barnier and Davis could hardly be more different. Trim, ascetic and well-
dressed, Barnier approaches politics like a sportsman-cum-engineer. He describes himself as a
“project man”, an organiser, ready with his bâton de maréchal to rally a common enterprise. In
Brussels’ prolific but unwieldy political machine, he found his métier.
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His sense of accomplishment comes from action. Former aides say if there is a 15-minute gap in his
diary “he will go spare” for want of things to do. For Barnier, politics is method and explanation.
Before EU meetings he demands a sheet of names, with pronunciation of first names, and
biographies. Then there are the charts, diagrams, maps — carried in every job and every situation.
Barnier is particularly proud of explaining a favourite colour-coded chart, mapping 40-odd pieces
of post-crisis financial legislation, to Pope Benedict. “I have the photograph!” he says.
He is evidently enjoying his moment. With Brexit, the Frenchman was handed the job of explaining
and defending all that he sees as sacred in Europe. “I know Michel Barnier well,” says Margrethe
Vestager, the EU’s competition commissioner. “And it is as if everything he has done in life has just
been preparation for this.”
Pierre Vimont, a veteran diplomat who served as Barnier’s chief of staff, notes he is something of
an outsider in French politics: “He has this great trust [in] Europe, which is not very common, the
ability to strike up personal relationships with foreigners and even to listen to them.” There is also
an unsinkable quality to his character. Barnier has often been written off, notably when he was
sacked as foreign minister in 2005, blamed for botching a referendum campaign on an EU
constitution. Like Davis, he has shown himself to be a comeback king.
When Theresa May entered Downing Street in July 2016 and made David Davis her Brexit
secretary, she revived a mercurial political career that appeared to be drawing to a close. Davis was
first elected Tory MP for Boothferry in East Yorkshire in 1987. By the time he ran against a
youthful David Cameron for the Tory leadership in 2005, Davis already looked like the past.
Cameron brought him into his team as shadow home secretary, but Davis burned his bridges by
standing down as an MP in 2008 to force a by-election focusing on his opposition to a Labour plan
to extend detention without trial for terror suspects to 42 days. This was all the evidence Cameron
needed that Davis was too reckless to trust.
May’s choice of him as Brexit secretary was a gamble, given that Davis, a former reservist in the
elite SAS special forces with a penchant for mountaineering and flying — had a reputation for
machismo unlikely to resonate with the technocrats of Brussels. Referring to Davis’s military
career, his old friend and Tory MP Andrew Mitchell says: “He knows how to kill people, but only at
weekends.” He adds: “When we go skiing, while I swallow hard at the top of a black run, he’s off.”
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Davis says he was trained during the cold war to operate behind enemy lines and call in military
strikes, possibly nuclear, on selected targets: “It would have been horrible.” His nose has been
broken three times while playing rugby, once in a swimming pool accident and once “late at night
on Christmas Eve” when he intervened in a mugging.
But the criticism of Davis from pro-Europeans is not that he is too aggressive in negotiations.
Instead they are perturbed by a cheery insouciance that suggests he thinks everything will turn out
all right, in spite of apparent evidence to the contrary. “I’ve decided the most depressing thing
about Brexit negotiations is David Davis’s chuckle,” says David Willetts, a former Tory minister. “I
get anxious every time I hear that chuckle.”
Davis attributes his optimism to his upbringing. Born in 1948 to a single mother, he spent his early
years in a prefabricated house in York. “We then moved to a house in London which was a slum
basically, two-up, two-down with an outside loo,” he says in an interview en route from Helsinki to
Stockholm. “The big improvement in our lifestyle was when we moved into a council house in
Tooting in south-west London. With the slight exception of that move to a slum, every year of my
life has been better than the last.”
Still, early brushes with Brussels after the referendum proved a chastening business for the Brexit
secretary. Within a few months, it was clear that Barnier held most of the negotiating cards and
was playing them well. Before formal talks began in June 2017, Davis predicted “the row of the
summer” would be the EU’s demand that Britain settle its exit bill before talks could start about a
future relationship. In the end he agreed to Barnier’s “sequence” within hours of arriving in
Brussels.
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It was a humbling moment for Davis, who spent 17 years as a senior manager for Tate & Lyle and
wrote a book in 1988 called How to Turn Around a Company, which included a section on
negotiating tactics. “Do not make the first major concession,” he advised then. “Make piecemeal
concessions with a declining concession pattern and keep all concessions low.”
This wasn’t the only time he had to give ground. In December 2016, the minister said Britain would
seek a transition deal after Brexit “only if it’s necessary”. Ultimately, a reluctant Davis — under
instruction from May — agreed to ask for a two-year transition during which Britain would stay
under EU rules, but without any say in shaping them. When raising it with Barnier, Davis could
only bring himself to say, “The prime minister wants . . .” In an icy exchange at Westminster in
January, Eurosceptic Tory MP Jacob Rees-Mogg accused Davis of leaving Britain as “a vassal
state”.
The Brexit secretary’s problems were compounded by the loss of Theresa May’s majority in the
June 2017 general election. May’s enfeebled position meant that she had to concede to almost
every demand made by the EU in order to secure a breakthrough on Brexit talks; failure could have
been fatal to her authority. Davis had urged May to seek a new five-year mandate. “David advised
the PM to have an election but didn’t advise her to screw it up,” said one ally of the minister.
During the autumn of 2017, Olly Robbins, a highly regarded civil servant, increasingly took the lead
in detailed negotiations in Brussels, sometimes leaving Davis in the dark while he dealt directly
with the prime minister. Robbins now does most of the heavy lifting in negotiations with Barnier’s
team, and sometimes with Barnier himself. Davis, according to his colleagues, feels that Robbins
has been too quick to haul up the white flag on occasion. He denies a major falling out, but adds:
“Look, there are always going to be arguments — not arguments, discussions — around which way
the policy should go, what’s negotiable and so on.”
The Brexit secretary insists that he is across the complex detail of his brief, although it is a
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commonly held view in British government circles and in Brussels that he shuns the small print.
One British official says: “Davis is lazy. He likes the grandeur of the job but he doesn’t read the
papers.” Even friends admit that by the end of 2017, Davis was “knackered”. He claims to have
haggled down Britain’s exit bill but admits that the first phase was tough. “It was a fairly static and
defensive negotiation,” he says.
With the coming of spring, though, his team detect a change in mood. “His tail’s up now,” says one
official. Davis won the cabinet argument about the proposed Brexit deal: he had long contended it
should be a bottom-up agreement based on a Canada-style trade deal — he calls it “Canada plus
plus plus” — featuring tariff-free trade with the EU, a close economic partnership and a new
security and defence treaty.
For Barnier, meanwhile, defining the post-Brexit

future poses a far bigger political challenge than
making the Brits pay past obligations. Davis believes
that Barnier will soon have to consider more seriously
the economic demands of member states.
He says French farmers, Slovakian carmakers and

Swedish consultancy firms will start to have a voice
and demand a Brexit deal that keeps trade flowing.
“The next stage is going to be much more fluid because we’re talking about what will be the
greatest free-trade agreement ever,” he says. “It’s an area where creativity will dominate.”
It’s this anything-goes mindset that team Barnier look at with cold bemusement. The contrast
between the free-trading, small-state Davis and the dirigiste Frenchman who, as the EU
commissioner overseeing a torrent of post-crisis financial regulation, proudly tamed the City of
London, is unmistakable. Colleagues say the Frenchman becomes “physically agitated” by novel
British ideas to virtually recreate the EU’s single market from outside. While Davis speaks of
mutual interest, Barnier the “project man” sees the Brits fundamentally pursuing “a different
project”.
One of Davis’s most important roles is not in direct negotiations, but in holding the Tory party
together at home. “I guess I form a sort of bridge,” the long-standing Eurosceptic says. An aide to
May confirms: “The PM relies on him as the expert on what the party can bear.”
But those who work with Davis believe he imagines his real moment will come sometime this
winter, at the very last moment, during the midnight hour when the EU posturing falls away and
real dealmaking begins. Barnier, for his part, recoils at the thought, pointing out his painstaking
work with European capitals to maintain a united front. “I am not alone,” he says. “I don’t know if
he is alone, but I am not alone. We are not building a speech, we are building a treaty.”
For all the Brexit hubbub, the real intrigue in Brussels these days is around another 2019 event:
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the appointment of the next commission president. Long accustomed to being underestimated,
Brexit has catapulted Barnier into a rather uncomfortable place: pole position.
“I’m not fussed,” he insists to friends who ask about the job. But whether he likes it or not, Barnier
is looking like the candidate to beat, the so-called Spitzenkandidat, when the centre-right EPP
group gathers in November to pick a nominee to succeed Jean-Claude Juncker in European
elections.
Barnier came within a whisker of defeating Juncker four years ago. This time around he needs the
backing of his own party in France, which has sharply veered to the right and away from pro-
European centrists like him. Then he needs time to campaign. A Brexit deal is supposed to come
together in October, weeks before the EPP congress; Davis, however, is not in any rush. Finally, he
needs support from EU leaders, including Emmanuel Macron, a French president in search of a
young dynamic face for a new Europe. “Barnier is a consummate EU pro,” says one longtime
friend. “The question is: do you want a consummate EU pro?”
While Brexit may thrust Barnier nearer to his

ultimate Brussels prize, for Davis it seems to have
snuffed out hopes of him one day becoming prime
minister, even if diehard supporters still cling to the
idea.
Like many Brexiters, Davis concluded that if May was

toppled now, the subsequent chaos in the Tory party
could usher in a Labour government and could see
Britain’s EU exit derailed. He says he has no
intention of moving against the prime minister.
British officials express surprise that Davis did not rock the boat last autumn during a dark period
of her premiership. “I chose not to,” he says.
Asked about this loyalty, Davis replies: “Look, we are in the middle of probably the most important
moment in our peacetime history for a very, very long time.” And in an apparent swipe at foreign
secretary Boris Johnson, widely seen as being on permanent leadership manoeuvres, he adds:
“Messing around, destabilising the government, having internal rows, virtue-signalling to would-be
candidates, these are all unnecessary distractions.”
By now the Brexit secretary has arrived at Stockholm airport for the flight home. Spending time
with him, it is noticeable that he is perhaps at his most animated when talking about his house in
Yorkshire, where he lives with his wife and an array of high-tech gadgetry. The place is equipped
with a remote-controlled lawnmower and heating system that can be operated from the airport’s
departure lounge.
Davis enthuses about the pond he has dug out, the hedgerows laid, the hundreds of trees planted
and the hare, kestrels and coot that congregate on his land. He is adamant that he has not
mellowed with age but his old friend Andrew Mitchell says he has: “It’s anno domini, really, isn’t
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it?” Davis, the man trained to bring down a nuclear attack on the communist bloc, now contents
himself with potshots at squirrels trying to eat the bird feed.
His critics will not forgive him or his pro-Brexit colleagues for the damage they believe their project
will inflict on Britain, but Davis insists: “I don’t have sleepless nights about that at all.” What
happens if it goes wrong? “I don’t intend to get it wrong.”
For his part, Barnier says his “credibility and respect” rest on completing Brexit, not on what
comes next. “I always drive home the nail. I say that to my children too — you have to hammer the
nail in all the way. Go the distance,” he says. “I will finish this task.”
Barnier and Davis, two politicians given a second chance by Brexit, are divided by culture, style and
personality. But they have this at least in common: they both need to finish the job. “I like Michel, I
wish him well in whatever he chooses to do,” says Davis, looking out at the snow storm now
engulfing Stockholm airport. Would he make a good European Commission president? Davis
thinks for a second and replies: “Probably the worst thing I could do for him is to be his advocate in
that.”
George Parker is the FT’s political editor. Alex Barker is the FT’s Brussels bureau chief
Follow @FTMag on Twitter to find out about our latest stories first. Subscribe to FT Life on
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Meet the Brexit negotiators: David Davis and Michel Barnier https://www.ft.

By Barnier’s telling — and he tells it a lot — he was 14

Barnier was also inspired by his mother’s response to

For Barnier, meanwhile, defining the post-Brexit

He says French farmers, Slovakian carmakers and

While Brexit may thrust Barnier nearer to his

Like many Brexiters, Davis concluded that if May was

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