New EU leadership team opposes Johnson-Farage-Hunt ideology

The new leadership team put in place to run the EU institutions over the next five years is a bucket of cold water over the exaggerated boasts from both Boris Johnson and Jeremy Hunt that, once installed in Downing Street, a new prime minister can persuade EU governments to give the UK a cake-and-eat-it Brexit.

In a major reaffirmation of core European values, the next European leadership team will be led by women and men who are strongly committed to European partnership and opposed to the anti-European ideology of Johnson, Viktor Orban, Matteo Salvini , Nigel Farage and Marine Le Pen.

The new EU Commission president, Ursula “Uschi” von der Leyen has something in common with Johnson. Both are children of European Commission officials and spent their early years in Brussels.

But unlike Johnson, who has always preferred fibs and fantasy about Europe, von der Leyen is a trained doctor and knows that telling lies to patients and their families is the height of irresponsibility. She described the Brexit campaign last year as a “burst bubble of hollow promises… inflated by populists,” reports the Guardian. “They had promised that Britain would benefit from Brexit. The fact is today that Brexit is a loss for everyone.”

Von der Leyen and her doctor husband, now a medical industry CEO, have close friends in London and she knows British politics.

She arrives with a new president of the European Council, liberal Charles Michel, the young Belgian prime minister. The new EU High Representative for Foreign Affairs and Security Policy is Josep Borrell, the Catalan socialist foreign minister of Spain.

Both Michel and Borrell are committed to European partnership and consider Brexit a victory for the Rupert Murdoch anti-European populist nationalism that has gathered strength this century.

Borrell in particular has suffered as a Catalan socialist who believes in maintaining the unity of Spain. He is no friend of those in Britain who want to break up the unity of Europe.

Michel accused Johnson in July 2016 of lacking “the courage to lead” the UK out of the Brexit “black hole.” He has also made clear his opposition to renegotiating the Irish backstop: “Between a ‘no deal’ and a ‘bad deal,’ I prefer a ‘no deal’, which will have the merit of clarity and responsibility,” he said in February. “A good deal is on the table, but the British parliament is trying to take us toward a bad deal. The British parliament’s demands on the backstop would weaken the economic development of Europe, a risk for our businesses and our jobs.”

Christine Lagarde, the new president of the European Central Bank, is French and close to Peter Mandelson. She worked as a corporate lawyer in New York before becoming France’s finance minister under Nicolas Sarkozy and then running the IMF.

Can she talk to the City of London, which will be hit hard by Brexit, and urge UK businesses to come out from under the duvet and campaign actively to give the people the right to take a decision before an amputation from Europe?

For the moment the EU institutions and their new leaders are in purdah until the new UK prime minister is installed in Downing Street. Despite the boast to the contrary from both the Johnson and Hunt camps, no one in either the 27 other EU capitals or Brussels will be ready to give up any core EU rules governing the single market to allow a special exception to be made for a UK that wants a pick ’n’ mix Europe.

In the opening session of the European Parliament, MEPs in Nigel Farage’s new one-man party staged an odd stunt when they turned around in their seats and stuck their buttocks into the microphones.

It symbolised the UK’s approach to the EU. Boris Johnson and Jeremy Hunt can waggle their bottoms as much as they like at the rest of Europe. But all it does is make the UK look smaller and irrelevant.

Denis MacShane is the UK’s former Minister of Europe. His new book, Brexeternity. The Uncertain Fate of Britain, will be published shortly.

This article was updated after publication to include the quotes from Ursula von der Leyen and Charles Michel.