Britain should not expect any compromise on the European Union’s free movement rules if it wants to stay in the single market, the former EU leader Herman Van Rompuy has said.



Van Rompuy, who led the European council during five years of economic crisis, warned that divorce negotiations between the UK and the EU would be very difficult. “I cannot imagine special treatment for Britain if they want access to our market of goods and services,” he told the Guardian.

Since the shock victory for leave, Britain’s relationship with the rest of Europe has been thrown into turmoil. Both sides are in post-referendum limbo, with official talks yet to start, while the search for a British prime minister goes on.

Van Rompuy, a former prime minister of Belgium, will not be involved in negotiations. But between 2009 and 2014 he chaired EU leaders’ summits, giving him unrivalled insight into the art of the Brussels compromise.



“In principle, you can always find compromises. But there will be one major difficulty. You cannot negotiate different treatment for Britain compared to the other 27,” he said.

Negotiations would be very difficult “because we have conflicting interests”, he said. He stressed that this was “nothing to do with punishment or revenge”, but the UK and the 27 other EU member states had different priorities. “The starting point for each of them is their own interests and the interests are at this stage … rather far away.”



Van Rompuy’s stance reflects the position agreed by 27 EU leaders last week, at a historic summit, where the UK had no place at the table. But other European politicians have raised hopes that compromise on free movement of people is in the offing. Alain Juppé, the frontrunner in France’s presidential elections, told the Financial Times that everything was up for negotiation.

Brussels-based insiders read Juppé’s remarks in a different way. “That doesn’t mean we compromise on basic principles,” said one senior national diplomat, adding that it would be “a mistake” for the UK to rely on talks with small groups of countries.

“It would make the position of the 27 more difficult to formulate and could lead to misunderstandings and illusions on the British side, and would prolong negative consequences,” he said.

Contrary to the claims of leave campaigners, Van Rompuy said Britain had more to lose than the EU from the breakup. “Europe is much more important to the British economy than the British economy is important to the 27,” he said.



Around 45% of British exports go to other EU countries, while the UK buys 16% of the EU27’s exported goods.

Although Brexit was economically “not that important” for the rest of the EU, Van Rompuy likened it to an “amputation” that had damaged the EU’s global standing. “For us it is a loss and in the eyes of the world it is a loss,” he said. “We are losing credibility. We are losing in terms of reputation.”



But Britain had no future as a stand-alone power, he insisted. “There is no country in Europe which is a great power. We are all middle-ranking powers, so there is no future for us to stand alone in this globalised world.”



Despite his concern about the loss of Britain’s diplomatic clout to the EU, he said British influence had already been waning. He pointed out that the British prime minister had not been in Minsk, when European leaders brokered a shaky truce in Ukraine. “France and Germany were there, but Britain was absent.”



Van Rompuy said he felt sad and angry about the referendum, because it had “not been necessary”. Although he declined to criticise David Cameron personally, he made it clear he blamed the prime minister for holding the vote, heedless of EU warnings that the electorate would answer a different question to the one on the ballot paper. “This was a referendum on internal British affairs, on government policies, on inequality, on job insecurity, on loss of identity.”



That analysis would be contested by Downing Street, who argue that unrestricted freedom of movement lost the referendum. Cameron has told other EU leaders that he believed he had to call a referendum because of public pressure.

Van Rompuy dismissed criticism that EU leaders could have done more to prevent Brexit, arguing that central and eastern Europe had made major compromises on in-work benefits for their citizens to secure Cameron’s February “special status” deal. “The responsibility for the defeat lies in Britain and only in Britain.”

Neither does he expect other countries to hold a referendum on leaving the EU. “The British example is frightening for a lot of people; they see only chaos and uncertainty in an already uncertain world.” But Europe needed a stronger social dimension in its policies to respond to public concern about income and wealth inequality. “In Europe and the US we need more of a social market economy.”

Van Rompuy, now on the university lecture circuit, will not play a role in Brexit talks. His former chief of staff, Didier Seeuws, will head the EU’s Brexit taskforce. Van Rompuy described his onetime right-hand man as “the right man on the right job”, “a maker of compromises with a true European spirit”.