Brussels fears Britain’s ‘Brexit chaos’ part of cunning plan

'I think it's tactics: They are playing for time on purpose,' says EU diplomat.

David Davis and Michel Barnier give a press conference after the first day of Brexit negotiations in Brussels | Emmanuel Dunand/AFP via Getty Images

Viewed from Brussels, the U.K. seemed so ill-prepared in the early rounds of Brexit negotiations that some EU countries think it must be a trap.

While the EU’s negotiating team say they are unconcerned and prepared for anything — and that any disorganization on the London side comes from serious divisions in the British political class — some EU diplomats are growing alarmed. Trade attachés in particular who know their British colleagues as tough, canny negotiators are suspicious of the seemingly fickle and aimless procrastination from the British government.

The Brits’ chaotic early posture in the Brexit talks has left them wondering whether London is pulling some sort of deft ploy — a strategy of pretending not to have a strategy.

On the face of it, that looks unlikely. The inconclusive outcome of the June election and Prime Minister Theresa May’s resulting loss of authority muddied London’s stance on Brexit. Cabinet rows over the nature of a post-Brexit transition have played out in public, casting doubt on whether there is a settled government position on key issues such as migration and membership of the customs union.

‘A bluff’

But those, by and large, are issues for later in the Brexit talks. The suspicion among some in Brussels is that the lack of clarity at cabinet level is being used as cover during the early negotiating salvos.

“I think it’s tactics: They are playing for time on purpose,” one attaché from a Western EU country said, “under the pretext of chaos in London.”

“In September they’re going to swamp us with [position] papers on the fault lines — exactly the issues where they know we [the EU27 countries] are divided,” he warned.

His colleague from a Southern country, asked: “Do they have a strategy? Or are they playing a bluff with the European Union? … It could be a strategy because the British are always so organized.”

Maltese Prime Minister Joseph Muscat expressed the same skepticism last week: “People who say the Brits don’t know what they are doing are wrong,” he told the Dutch newspaper De Volkskrant, “I have lived in Britain, I know the British mentality. A non-prepared British government official simply doesn’t exist.”

“By the end of the year, the tables will have turned” — a diplomat

Jean-Paul Gauzès, who served as a French MEP from 2004 to 2014 and negotiated frequently with British counterparts as a member of the Committee on Economic and Monetary Affairs, said that in his experience, U.K. officials pursued their goals with single-minded determination while keeping others off balance.

“The Brits are pragmatic and very concrete,” Gauzès said, adding: “The Brits never ask for clarity because the more ambiguous it is, the better it is.”

In negotiations on finance directives, Gauzès said: “Everybody would move except the British MEPs who would wait until the end of the process to say: ‘I will tell you how to say that in proper English.’ Their ‘proper English’ always meant in favor of British interests.”

One EU official said that it was just common sense not to underestimate the British. “Having seen the movie ‘Dunkirk‘ over the weekend, history might suggest that the British could turn disaster and disorganization around,” the official said.

If the Brits are faking, then among the potential scenarios, officials said, is a stall for time that would leave the EU side feeling pressured to agree to a future trade deal rather than allow a disorderly withdrawal.

“I think Ollie Robbins [the prime minister’s EU adviser and chief civil servant in the Brexit department] knows very well what he is doing,” the Western diplomat said. “He is telling Davis to wait … By the end of the year, the tables will have turned.”

Continental fault lines

Another strategy that some EU officials fear is an aggressive outreach by the U.K. to corporate executives in the EU27, particularly in countries with businesses that could be hard hit by Brexit. The fear is that the U.K. might win friends with an argument that Brussels has been overly focused on winning the initial negotiating battle over the U.K.’s Brexit bill to plug a budget hole, rather than focusing on securing a trade deal that would protect businesses for decades to come.

“They’ll say ‘we want to talk about trade, but the EU only wants to talk about money,”’ the western diplomat said.

Others on the EU side though said that given the clear evidence of real political divisions at the top of the ruling Conservative party in the U.K. such fears were unwarranted, even fantastical.

A seasoned EU diplomat said that if London had constructed an elaborate ruse to gain the upper hand in Brexit, it had fooled even the British negotiators. If it is indeed a mise en scène, this diplomat said: “It would be an extremely sophisticated one.”

And an EU official directly involved in the Brexit talks dismissed as unjustified “speculation” the idea that the U.K. is operating a hidden cunning plan. “It seems to me, based on what I read, there is no clarity on the direction in which they want to move and it’s very difficult to implement a negotiating strategy if you don’t have that clarity.”

This official did not rule out the possibility that London was preparing some sort of Brexit Trojan horse, but said it seemed highly unlikely. “Nobody underestimates the capability of British diplomats. British diplomacy has been admired not only in the EU but globally,” the official said. “The only ones who know the truth are the Brits themselves. Are they ready or are they trying to dance some very strange ballet that we don’t fully get?”

‘Sitting on our hands’

Irish Commissioner for Agriculture Phil Hogan summed up the feeling in Brussels when he told Ireland’s RTÉ Radio One Saturday that Britain’s approach to Brexit negotiations is beset by “inconsistency and lack of coordination” that “beggars belief.” Hogan warned that “it seems that the United Kingdom still have to come to terms with their negotiating mandate and this is happening at a time when the clock is ticking.”

A senior U.K. government official said that any perception of chaos or incompetence was false: “This idea that we’ve been sitting on our hands for the last year is just bollocks. We have been working extremely hard. What you will start to see over the next couple of months is the government setting out in public what has been happening in private.”

A second government aide said there would be a number of official position papers published in August before the next round of U.K.-EU negotiations, which are due to take place between August 28 and September 1 in Brussels. The papers will set out the government’s official position on a number of “core” elements of Brexit, the aide said.

Tom McTague and Maïa de La Baume contributed reporting.

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