There is so little detail on David Cameron’s talks with Jean-Claude Juncker that it is almost outweighed by the briefing on what the pair ate while at Chequers (a spring salad, followed by pork belly and vegetables and a dessert of lime bavarois). What we were told was that ‘Mr Juncker reiterated that he wanted to find a fair deal for the UK and would seek to help’ and that ‘they talked through the issue at some length in the spirit of finding solutions to these problems. They agreed that more discussion would be needed, including with other leaders, on the best way forward’.
Cameron intends to speak to all European leaders before the next summit, but even if he did have a cordial dinner with Juncker, it’s clear that he will need to spend the next month on an all-out charm offensive in order to win leaders over. While he was munching on pork belly, the French and Germans were finalising a pact to integrate the eurozone without reopening the EU’s treaties, which has been written up as a ‘blow’ to David Cameron. It’s probably less of a blow politically than Philip Hammond suggesting that the renegotiation could be done without treaty change, or indeed less of a risk than trying to sell a renegotiation that has a sort of IOU for a future treaty changed attached to it. Indeed, the Franco-German document does speak of a need to ‘look at the institutional and political framework, the common tools and the legal bases that would be pertinent in the longer term’, which suggests treaty change is still on the table in the future, just not within Cameron’s timetable.
Cameron last week warned that the debate about EU reform will contain lots of ‘noises’, but that in the end, just the result mattered. But what does matter is that his charm offensive that he conducts across Europe really is a charm offensive where he speaks to leaders in the ‘European way’, as Angela Merkel would put it. It may not matter what sort of noises they make after the meetings, but if leaders are privately annoyed by the tone Britain strikes, then Cameron will find the next year or two pretty heavy going.
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