The most interesting piece of news yesterday in my opinion was a tweet from Michel Barnier which seemed to slip out almost unnoticed. The EU chief negotiator visited Angela Merkel in Berlin to discuss the ongoing but stalled trade talks which Johnson and Von der Leyen spoke about on Saturday. There is clearly an effort going on to break the logjam but with trust eroded by the UK's cavalier attitude to the Withdrawal Agreement, it is not going to be easy.
Here's the tweet:
🇪🇺🇩🇪In Berlin: very good discussion with Chancellor Merkel & exchange with @HeikoMaas. Useful dialogue with @Der_BDI, @DieBDA + @DHIK_News.Together with @EU2020DE, we are working hard to reach a fair deal w/ #UK, in line with our mandate. Wir sind geschlossen und entschlossen.
— Michel Barnier (@MichelBarnier) October 5, 2020
Naturally you wouldn't expect Barnier to say anything other than he had a very good discussion with Merkel and her Foreign Minister, Heiko Mass, but he also had a "useful dialogue" with the BDI, the federation of German industry and the BDA, the German employers organisation.
They are the equivalent of the CBI and the Institute of Directors over here. It isn't a surprise that he should speak to them since it is the EU way to involve business and industry, to consult, to listen and take account of the interests of the European wealth creators. No, that's not surprising either.
What is of interest is that he chose to tweet it out at this crucial time.
Was it a sign that German industry are about to crack, as David Davis and Digby Jones once claimed, and offer Britain access to the single market with no LPF guarantees, state aid provisions and effective governance framework? It's possible, but I think unlikely.
A more plausible explanation is that it is a sign Barnier has the backing of German industry to stand firm and to demonstrate to the UK government that Merkel and BMW are not about to ride to their rescue. Barnier even mentions they want a fair deal "in line with our mandate." I do not believe he has been given wider room for manoeuvre - but we'll see.
Another intriguing development is the claim coming from Japan, first reported by the Nikkei apparently, that Nissan and Toyota are calling on the British government to compensate them if tariffs are introduced on EU imports - as they almost certainly will be - with or without a deal since most Japanese cars simply don't contain enough home produced content to be considered under a tariff free deal.
Is this about the letter sent by the then Business Secretary Greg Clark to Nissan in 2016 which has still not been made public? It was widely believed to have offered guarantees of one sort or another to encourage them to stay.
I imagine the EU will have seen the reports too. The EU were concerned at the time that such assurances would breach state aid rules and hence the story plays into the need to make a stand on state subsidies. If the UK government compensates Nissan and Toyota the tariffs will not have the desired impact and would be rendered useless. It may be the need to pay the tariffs which is causing the UK government to try and escape EU state aid rules - who knows?
In a further development, Katy Hayward, a political sociologist and a senior fellow at the think tank UK in a Changing Europe, has noticed an amendment in the UK Internal Market bill as it reaches the Lords, which now overrides parts of the 1998 Human Rights Act, a key plank of the Good Friday Agreement. This will not go down well on Capitol Hill.
As events in the talks reach a climax with the clock ticking ever louder, the appearances of Johnson on TV seem to show a man worn down by it all, with no grip on the details, his hair and clothes in disarray and staggering from one gaffe to the next. He is symbolic of a government that uses an exel spreadsheet to calculate and store date on the chaotic test and trace system and in doing so manages to "lose" 15,000 tests.
I see Dan Hodges, the Conservative commentator and Mail columnist has what seems to be a quote from a minister - "What you have to understand is there are four people who are running the country now,' the Minister says. 'But none of them is Boris. Dom [Cummings], Michael [Gove], Rishi [Sunak] and Carrie [Symonds, the PM's partner]. That's it'."
I could believe it. Johnson is not being usurped, he was never interested in running the country, he just wanted it to appear so and for him to enjoy the trappings of it.
But as coronavirus seems to be picking up again and as the crunch moment is almost upon us in negotiations with the EU, he is looking dangerously out of his depth and the country out of control.
