David Cameron is setting off with his children to visit Angela Merkel on Friday. It’s part of his EU reform mission that started and was thrown off course on Monday following the death of Margaret Thatcher. As I blogged back then, the circumstances aren’t perfect, and one of the reasons for that is that France and Germany recently snubbed an invitation to be involved in the UK’s ‘balance of competences’ review. But today Cameron tried to play down the significance of this. He told Adam Boulton:
‘Our review of competences was always and will be a British exercise. We didn’t particularly, that story was… anyone’s free to feed into our review, but that piece of work is a British piece of work. For years people said you’ll never have the European budget cut, I’ve got it cut. For years people said that you’ll never have the courage to veto the treaty. I’ve vetoed a treaty so we’re not involved in it. Chancellor Merkel and I will be discussing other things and we do agree on some things, and one thing we do agree about is that the European Commission should start doing less, should start taking things off the table.
‘I think we get on very well, we’ve had our arguments and disagreements in the past. I’m a huge admirer of hers, I think she’s a phenomenal political leader, a force to be reckoned with. We both think the Commission does too many things, and we’ll have a lot to talk about this weekend.’
This is all very well and good, but as Nick Watt, who broke the story of Le Snub, points out, it doesn’t exactly match the description of the review that William Hague gave MPs. He said: ‘The review will be an outward-facing exercise, both domestically and internationally.’
It’s interesting that Cameron mentioned the treaty that he ‘vetoed’ back in 2011. The reason he did that was Merkel letting him down at the last minute: something James outlined in his column a few months ago. As he sets out to find some common ground with the German Chancellor on what the European Commission might start doing less of, he’ll be wary of trusting that ground not to shift under his feet in the next few months.
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