EVEN the French say so: David Cameron played a near-perfect match. “He is a real negotiator; very, very tenacious,” declared a senior French official amid the brutal bargaining over the EU’s seven-yearly budget that dragged on for a whole night and a day. When it was all over, Mr Cameron was none too shy about trumpeting his success:

The British public can be proud that we have cut the seven-year credit card for the European Union for the first time ever. And as a result the EU’s seven-year budget will cost less than 1% of Europe’s gross national income. That is also for the first time ever… I also said that I would also never, in any way, entertain any further changes to the British rebate. Attempts to undermine the rebate were made again and again at almost every meeting there has been on the subject over the last few months. As ever, it was attacked from every side. But I fought off these attempts. The British rebate is safe.

While every British prime minister had conceded an increase in the budget, Mr Cameron had brought it down. While Tony Blair had surrendered part of the British rebate in 2005, Mr Cameron had preserved it. And he did not even find himself battling alone.

In truth, Britain entered the negotiation over the trillion-euro budget with several advantages. First, as leader of the most Eurosceptic of the EU’s member states, Mr Cameron cared least about the EU being seen to fail over the budget. That is not true of Germany, France and many others, who cannot appear too unashamed in sacrificing the cause of the European Union for narrow national interests.

Second, Britain’s permanent rebate is firmly guaranteed since Mrs Thatcher swung her handbag at Fontainebleau in 1984. Several of the EU’s other net contributors feared that, without a deal, their own temporary rebates would expire. “That made them more amenable to seeking an agreement,” explained France's president, François Hollande.

Third, net recipients from eastern Europe faced budgetary chaos in planning long-term projects if, in the case of stalemate, the EU was forced to live on yearly budgets.

Fourth, and perhaps most powerful, is the fact that Germany’s chancellor, Angela Merkel, to a large extent backed Mr Cameron. She did not want to isolate the prime minister as she did in December 2011, over the vote for the fiscal compact, a treaty to tighten fiscal discipline in the euro zone. The budget ended up where Germany had always wanted it: 1% of GNI.

The numbers speak for themselves. In real terms (2011 euros), the so-called multi-annual financial framework, worth a cumulative €960 billion for the seven years from 2014 to 2020, is about 3% lower than spending for the current 2007-2013 period. It is about 12% lower than the budget first presented by the European Commission.

The British were helped by the fact that the EU budget, in keeping with French tradition, is expressed in two slightly different sets of figures: “commitments” (the amount of money that the EU can commit to spend every year) and “payments” (the amount that it may disburse annually). The British negotiated in terms of payments while everybody else bargained in commitments. By widening the gap between the two, big spenders could claim to have won a bit more, while Britain could claim victory. In terms of payments, the real-terms cut was nearly 4%.

All this should ensure relatively easy passage of the budget in the House of Commons. As James Kirkup of the Daily Telegraph puts it in his blog, "as triumphs go, this one is looking pretty triumphant". After his carefully-tuned speech (here) setting out his case for reform of the EU and for a referendum on British membership by 2017, the budget deal caps a successful period in Mr Cameron's European policy that had—and still has—much potential to go wrong (see my column in October).

All this said, the net contribution (the difference between what a country pays in to the EU budget and what it receives back) of Britain and other rich countries is likely to increase for two reasons: the grossly unequal farm subsidies given to western European farmers, compared with those from ex-communist states, is being gradually levelled out; and payments to poorer regions of richer countries are also being reduced.

A bigger criticism is that Mr Cameron gave priority to the size of the budget rather than its quality.

In a union where each of the 27 members wields a veto, and each must claim victory (see Open Europe's compilation of declarations), even a successful budget negotiation produces two effects: great confusion over figures and immobilism. The old joke is that the French get the Common Agricultural Policy (CAP), the British get to keep the rebate and the Germans get to pay the bill. Little has changed since then, except that these days one must add the fact that Poland also gets to keep its cohesion funds.

Any change in the budget is incremental at best. The CAP, which once consumed almost 80% of the EU budget, has declined to just over 40% of the budget in 2007-2013. It will continue to taper down slowly, to just under 38% over 2014-2020 (see my column on the CAP).

By contrast the new areas of spending that are more likely to promote growth—research & development, higher-education exchanges under the Erasmus programme and infrastructure projects of the Connecting Europe Facility (see my column on EU infrastructure)—will increase by about 37%. But this is a large increase on a comparatively small amount. As a share of overall spending, these growth-friendly programmes increase from 9% to 13% of the budget. In other words, the EU budget remains a relic of a wasteful past.

Before a deal could be clinched, several ticklish problems had to be settled. Denmark demanded and got a rebate. Austria will see its rebate reduced, but not entirely; the Netherlands fought to keep its own reduction. Italy had to be squared too, because its net contribution has been increasing in recent years. Given that it has no rebate, spending allocations had to be adjusted to bring it in to line. More broadly, southern European countries struggling with recession were treated leniently.

The question now is whether there will be a veto from the 28th negotiating partner—the European Parliament. It tends to measure the success of Europe by the size of the budget, and wields greater power since the 2009 Lisbon treaty. An absolute majority of MEPs must approve the budget, which sets a high bar. Leading figures have threatened to vote down the budget, a fact that Mr Hollande tried to exploit in negotiations, and are now threatening to do so in a secret ballot, which increases the scope for troublemakers. Will the European Parliament dare throw the budget into uncertainty, potentially until after the German election this autumn (and maybe beyond)?

There is a sense of pointlessness after the sleepless night, the brinkmanship and the genuine anger. The EU budget accounts of just 1% of the EU’s national wealth, and 2% of governments’ spending. It matters most to smaller, poorer countries for whom EU transfers offer a real economic boost (more than 4% of GDP for some). But for the big, wealthy states that are the main contestants in the budget fight, the net contributions amount to about 0.2%-0.3% of GDP (see page 102 of this report). By the end of the battle, the amounts in dispute were even smaller: a billion here and there, divided over seven years and among 27 members.

Back home, prime ministers might not even be called upon to adjudicate the allocation of such fractions of fractions, let alone be made to lose sleep over them. In Brussels, strangely, such issues suddenly become matters of political life and death.

(Photo credit: AFP)