From the Spectator…shame the BBC joined in the anti-Boris outrage…
A few weeks ago, Boris Johnson made a point about the EU negotiations and the futility of the idea of punishing Britain for the sake of it. ‘If Monsieur Hollande wants to administer punishment beatings to anybody who chooses to escape’, he said, ‘rather in the manner of some World War II movie, then I don’t think that is the way forward, and actually it’s not in the interests of our friends and partners’. Cue howls of outrage. ‘Abhorrent and deeply unhelpful’, said Guy Verhofstadt, the European Parliament’s chief Brexit negotiator. But was Boris really so wide of the mark?
Yesterday Jean-Claude Juncker, president of the European Commission, gave an interview to Bild on Sunday where he boasted that no other EU country would consider leaving the union once they see how harshly Britain will be treated by his in negotiations. ‘The remaining member states will fall in love with each other again and renew their vows with the European Union,’ he said. ‘They will all see from Britain’s example that leaving the EU is a bad idea.’
This is precisely the mentality that the Foreign Secretary held up to ridicule – the idea that the EU is held together by fear of what happens if you leave.
Like some latter-day Basil Fawlty, Boris Johnson mentioned the War and didn’t get away with it.
The foreign secretary urged the French president not to “administer punishment beatings” on Britain for choosing to escape the EU “rather in the manner of some World War Two movie”.
Not surprisingly, uproar has ensued. Former Labour leader Ed Miliband said Mr Johnson had shown once again that he could be “supremely clever and yet immensely stupid”.
The foreign secretary has form on this. During the referendum campaign last year he compared the EU to Nazi Germany, telling the Daily Telegraph both were attempting to unify Europe: “Napoleon, Hitler, various people tried this out, and it ends tragically.”
This caused a flurry of headlines and a social media storm that passed quickly. Yet the impact on EU politicians was lasting.
One EU diplomat explained it to me like this: “You Brits don’t understand us when we talk about European values. To us they are important because they are not Nazi values, they are not Vichy values, they are not fascist values, not the values of the Greek junta. They are the values of a different Europe.
“So for that clown to compare us to the Nazis, well, that hurts and will not be forgotten.”
rachel shabi
