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The last, agonising hours of negotiating the deal almost ruined Christmas for everyone involved but its political reception in Britain has been beyond anything British prime minister Boris Johnson could have wished for.
With Labour leader Keir Starmer promising that the party will vote for it, there is no chance of rejection in next week’s House of Commons vote.
But Johnson wants his deal to be celebrated by his own supporters as the Brexit they voted for in 2016 and all the signs are he will achieve that.
Conservative-supporting newspapers including the Sun and the Daily Mail welcomed the deal before it was agreed, hailing it as a triumph for Johnson.
Newspapers of every stripe have carried enthusiastic accounts of David Frost’s negotiating style, complete with identical quotes about how he outwitted Michel Barnier by presenting the same proposal in several different ways like Diet Coke and Coke Zero, in what they call “the Coke manoeuvre”.
Frost is reported to have characterised the EU’s negotiating style as lurching between that of a juggernaut and a moody teenager and to have characterised his predecessor Olly Robbins as a mouse.
“He gave us a four-box grid of different modes of negotiator: teenager, tank, mouse and leader,” the Times quotes a senior member of his team as saying. “He told us the EU tends towards the first two and the UK has too often been a mouse. We needed to be the leader in the room and rise above things.”
Johnson’s message on Christmas Eve to his fellow Brexiteers, notably the hardliners on his Conservative backbenches, was that his deal was utterly different from the arrangements proposed by Theresa May. Her’s would have kept Britain effectively in the EU customs union and dynamically aligned to the single-market rulebook.
No role for ECJ
The new deal gives Britain regulatory autonomy but if it chooses to diverge from EU standards, it could see tariffs imposed on some of its exports. Crucially for the Brexit true believers, there will be no role for the European Court of Justice in arbitrating disputes.
While Nigel Farage announced “the war is over” and Brexit had now been accomplished, among the most interesting moments in Johnson’s press conference was when he rejected the characterisation of Britain’s relationship with the EU as a war.
“The EU was and is an extraordinary concept, and it was born of the agony of the second World War and it was founded by idealistic people in France and Germany and Italy who never wanted those countries to go to war again. In many ways it was and is a noble enterprise,” he said.
Johnson suggested that, freed from its “very dense programme of integration”, Britain will be the EU’s strongest ally and a reliable partner with shared goals and values.
Such a partnership may be possible in the future but the agreement reached on Christmas Eve also creates opportunities for future disagreements and conflict, as Switzerland’s relationship with the EU demonstrates.