In the first weeks of their new job, around ten officials of Barnier’s team designed multiple scenarios for how negotiations might end. The outcome in 2020 came close to the best-case scenario imagined in October 2016. The UK left with an Article-50 agreement, which was better than leaving without one. It was definitely better than the worst-case scenario of a UK government gradually violating its obligations to the EU and pulling out without notifying its departure. The Withdrawal Agreement honoured all EU and UK legacy obligations of the membership period, including the money the UK owed and citizens’ rights. The new relationship was a free trade agreement without the UK maintaining elements of the single market or other membership benefits, but with legally binding guarantees on a level playing field. All national administrations in the EU were ready to apply the new provisions by the 1 January 2021, which avoided the need for any phasing mechanisms, unlike what happened in the UK.

How that outcome came about was entirely unexpected. The political pressure from Brexiters on Theresa May in 2017 to keep the process moving forwards, after she lost the elections, weakened her bargaining position on the financial settlement, in the face of an immovable bloc of 27 countries that refused to budge on sequencing. In 2018, May kept the negotiations on Northern Ireland active in parallel to the 2018 talks on the future relationship, which the EU wanted to de-couple. As a result, the 2018 deal conceded a more gradual departure to the UK because of Northern Ireland, with less turbulence for British export and supply chains than what Boris Johnson eventually agreed in 2019 and 2020. After the UK Parliament shot down May’s deal in March 2019, the extension to the Article-50-negotiation period forced the UK to hold European elections in May 2019. An absurd situation, which Juncker, Barnier and many EU leaders had tried to avoid, further polarized British politics between opponents of Brexit and advocates of a harder exit, killing the middle ground which May, a majority of Tory MPs and the Labour Party occupied and ultimately leading to a crushing victory by Boris Johnson in the December 2019 elections.

In his tour of capitals in 2016, Barnier raised the likelihood of a transition after the UK's withdrawal and told government leaders: “My expectation is that we will work from October 2017 until summer 2018 on the new relationship. Afterwards, we can define the terms of a transition”. Some expressed surprise. The Maltese prime minister Muscat told Barnier that a transition made life too easy for the UK. National governments thought about possible relocations of financial services to their country. A short timeframe without a transition was therefore in their interest to add pressure on UKbased companies. Many in the German government pressed to make any transition short because they wanted to show that leaving the EU came at a cost well in advance of the 2019 European elections. Merkel told Barnier it was important to define first the future relationship and subsequently design a transition as a pathway towards the new destination, which would show the cost of non-membership.

Things turned out differently as a standstill transition with an economic and legal status quo was agreed in March 2018 before talks on the future even started. That outcome was more in line with what the French president Hollande told Barnier in the Elysee Palace in October 2016: “the existing institutional framework would need to apply”, he said, and added that the EU could not separate the four freedoms during transition. In that case, the Commission's top lawyer told a seminar with all 27 member states at the end of November 2016, the jurisdiction of EU judges had to apply in the UK. That was the model of a standstill transition. The April 2017 European Council guidelines reflected that the EU's thinking was fluctuating between a model of prolonging quasi-membership in a “time-limited manner” or creating “bridges towards the foreseeable framework for the future relationship in light of the progress made”. Sector-based continuations of membership arrangements after Brexit or transitional bridges to the future put the UK in a comfortable position, however, to ease smoothly into a new future and those ideas were soon abandoned.

The claim that David Davis and the UK failed to prepare properly erupted over a picture in Barnier's office tweeted on 17 July 2017, when negotiations finally started in Brussels after a ceremonial opening in June. That morning, the news website Euractiv wrote “there was fresh turmoil as a weakened Prime Minister Theresa May prepared to urge her warring ministers to end damaging leaks against each other over Brexit”. The omens for the rapid progress Barnier wanted were not good. Hammond insisted publicly that the UK had to ask for a transition period just before Davis, who was against that idea, started his conversation with Barnier. The plan was to have a closed-door chat before convening with the lead negotiators on all withdrawal topics. The meeting would be “1+2” in the jargon of diplomacy, two advisors for each principal. Olly Robbins and Tim Barrow participated, respectively the prime minister's Europe advisor and the UK ambassador to the EU. Barnier, his deputy Sabine Weyand and Stephanie Riso, director in his small team, each had a large, blue folder in front of them, bursting with papers. Barnier's logistics team diligently collected in these folders the two EU position papers on citizens’ rights and the financial settlement of a few weeks before, the mandate and guidelines adopted by the Council and European Council, various EU statements, Theresa May's notification letter and speeches. Davis, whom Barnier had to convince a few days earlier to come to Brussels to open the round of negotiations, came empty-handed. Barnier wanted to use the meeting to tell him that this Janus-faced approach of being negotiator without negotiating could not last. The British delegation had to solve their disagreements internally, he said, as the EU was ready to move forward and get Brexit done. Juncker's advisors wanted this story out of the way as much as possible to avoid distracting the EU from what it called a “positive agenda”.

Just before Commission protocol officials closed the door of Barnier's office, a UK communications advisor asked if the EU photographer could take another picture of Davis and Barnier sitting down at the oval, glass table.

“Customs and consent” summed up the two sticking points one week before a possibly decisive European Council meeting on 17 October 2019. On consent, the EU agreed that the Northern Ireland Assembly needed to confirm the sustained application of regulatory and customs provisions over time. The UK proposals, however, raised two problems. Frost argued the Assembly should be able to prevent the backstop kicking in, even after the House of Commons ratified it. Such a prior veto right whereby a devolved assembly would overrule a commitment by its sovereign state made no sense for the EU, which wanted certainty that an approved agreement would apply in law and in practice. In addition, in terms of voting procedure, the UK's proposal did not require a majority in the Northern Ireland Assembly. A minority of either unionists or nationalists would be enough to withhold consent. The European Commission refrained from getting too involved in this. Ireland and the UK, as co-guarantors of the Good Friday Agreement, had to clarify the best voting method. UK commentators accused the Commission of misrepresenting the peace accord but this episode at least demonstrates that the EU avoided getting too closely involved in the mechanics of how Stormont would take decisions.

The second sticking point was more of direct concern for the EU. The UK's convoluted system of customs checks – at source as goods left warehouses and companies, and dispersed in various destination points on the island – was unworkable and did not protect the all-island economy. The proposal to exempt small traders opened the door widely to fraud and its heavy emphasis on enforcement underscored for the EU the porous nature of its proposed design. EU practice and law furthermore integrate checks on regulatory standards in customs procedures. The UK could not explain how these checks would work. In debriefing member states, EU experts said the UK ideas did not allow for a proper risk analysis of incoming goods and added that the UK wanted to use customs facilitations for companies that did not qualify under EU rules. Small companies would become automatically “trusted traders”, which meant a better treatment compared to bigger companies that had to qualify for the audited scheme of “authorised economic operators”. This made no sense.

After 47 years of membership, the UK left the European Union on 31 January 2020. A digital clock beamed onto the facade of 10 Downing Street counted down to 11pm, the beginning of a new chapter in EU–UK relations on a profoundly different footing and one yet to find firm ground. During the Brexit negotiations, I was a close aide to Michel Barnier, the European Union's Chief Negotiator from October 2016 until March 2021, and witnessed the whole process with the UK team of Theresa May and then of Boris Johnson. Working for Barnier gave me a ringside seat to all crucial talks as a member of the EU negotiation team. This book is a personal analysis of the Brexit story from that vantage point in Brussels. It does not represent the position of the European Commission.

One motivation for writing this book is that I believe EU civil servants should play an active part in public conversations: openness creates trust. I had privileged access to information of public interest, which I use in this book. The Commission's unprecedented transparency policy for Brexit has made all official papers freely available online since May 2017, including pos-ition papers, internal documents sent to member states and draft legal texts on the terms of withdrawal and the future relationship. There was never a secret as to what the EU wanted. I draw on these sources, hundreds of meetings with national officials and Members of the European Parliament, as well as the media archives of newspapers and magazines quoted in the text, in addition to my own notes of personal discussions with participants at the time. I have eschewed the formality of citations and a bibliography as this is a first-hand account of my lived experience of Brexit. This book tells the inside story of the EU position and reveals how the “Brussels process” worked.

Some authors and commentators mistakenly think that the UK shaped the EU's behaviour and positions during the negotiations, but British politics was either too divided or too disruptive to have an effect on the EU. This book discusses the real rationale for the EU's positions and explains why it acted as it did.

While Barnier was flying back from Washington on Friday 13 July, his team analysed the Chequers’ white paper together with the 27 national Brexit delegates in the Council Working Party. The UK government had published the paper the day before and national authorities immediately fired off extensive sets of questions to their delegates in Brussels, which they consolidated and emailed to Barnier's team. A long meeting went painstakingly through all the items. Many comments focused on the threats to EU interests as well as the integrity and autonomy of EU governance. Others inquired about specific policies. What does it mean that the UK's internal security tools will “closely align” to EU tools, some capitals asked, and how may that affect future cooperation? The UK wanted to stay in the EU data protection board and use the EU's “one-stop-shop”, a system whereby one national agency licenses EU-wide operations. Would the UK data regulator apply EU or UK rules on data protection for that purpose, some capitals asked? And what happens if the regulator does not apply EU rules, or does not apply them correctly: who can sue the UK since there is no EU Court jurisdiction? Some capitals asked why the UK wanted a common rulebook for goods but not for public procurement of goods. On services, a member state wrote, the UK government mentions that the UK's regulatory flexibility means “the UK and the EU will not have current levels of access to each other's markets”. Could the UK government further specify in which specific service sectors it expected access to be more limited compared to the single market? On the novel customs system of a dual tariff, would the UK be able to point to any other country in the world that had already developed such a system? They were all relevant questions that merited detailed replies two years after the referendum.

Barnier's team, however, cautioned national diplomats not to engage too much in a textual analysis of the white paper. “We must see this exercise as creating space for negotiations”, it told the Council Working Party. A few days later, Tony Blair visited Barnier and urged him to push more quickly for clarity on the future relationship.

In June 2016 the British people were offered a simple “stay-or-go” choice over their 43-year membership of the European Union. It was a binary decision and the British people voted to leave. That was the easy part. As the story narrated in this book attests, transforming that high-level political decision into a practical reality has proved to be an agonising learning experience. For most of those five years I was a Brexit beat reporter, my ear pressed to the keyhole of the negotiating rooms that Stefaan De Rynck describes, earwigging the discussions that would shape the UK's new relationship with the EU. What is striking, for all the wealth of anecdote and insight De Rynck provides about the talks with the UK, is that Michel Barnier and his team spent more time talking to EU governments than to the UK. This built a united front against London that, for all Britain's diplomatic efforts to expose divisions in the EU, was never cracked.

This observation will no doubt infuriate some Brexiters. They will read this book and find their earnest belief that Brussels has been unbearably “smug”, “rigid” and “intransigent” during these negotiations to be fully justified. Who can forget Barnier's response when asked about Boris Johnson's remark that Brussels could “go whistle” for its Brexit divorce bill? Barnier observed that he could not hear any whistling, “just the clock ticking”. Such French insouciance was enough to bring English blood to the boil. And yet the fact is, despite Johnson's rhetoric, the UK paid the bill. Just like – after similar bouts of breast-beating and table-banging – it accepted the EU's timetable for the exit talks; the border in the Irish Sea; a deal on fishing rights and a so-called “level playing field” commensurate with the low-ambition trade deal it eventually signed.

For that is the story of the Brexit negotiation: the consistent and steady application of leverage in Brussels to achieve carefully predetermined negotiating aims. The outcomes speak for themselves. Too often the UK, as De Rynck pithily observes, “played a game of chicken, by itself ”. It remains one of the great ironies of Brexit that the same UK politicians who spent decades deriding the EU as legalistic and bureaucratic should have ever expected EU member states to be sentimental when negotiating the UK's departure.

On 2 March 2020, nearly four years after the referendum, Michel Barnier and David Frost kicked off the talks in Brussels on a new partnership. They sat opposite one another at a large oval table in the Robert Schuman meeting room of the Berlaymont, with around 20 collaborators on each side. Frost and Barnier did not know each other well. Frost had mostly dealt with Barnier's collaborators for the 2019 talks on Northern Ireland and the political declaration, when Barnier was mostly in touch with the Brexit Secretary Steve Barclay. For 2020, Johnson did not appoint a cabinet member for the negotiations. Michael Gove took political responsibility in the Commons for what Johnson's special advisor was doing and Frost himself took on gradually a more public persona via Twitter and speeches. EU negotiators regarded Frost as aloof, not always truly engaging in conversations or applying flexibility to search for common ground, although his repetition of known UK positions was also a way to test the EU's resolve. At university, Frost had studied medieval French but his fluency in French did not bring his relationship with Barnier beyond the professional and functional remit. Both men would try to create a warmer atmosphere by meeting regularly for lunch. Barnier respected Frost, even though he disagreed with his worldview, and he appreciated Frost's gesture of inviting him for dinner in de Gaulle's wartime office in London, but there never seemed to be much chemistry between them. After December 2020, they lost touch. Of the four negotiators with whom Barnier worked, only David Davis sent him a message to congratulate him on the deal. David Frost wished him well when he left the Commission to return to French politics a few months later.

British journalists often referred to the negotiations as the “trade talks with the EU”. Foreign and security policy, as well as police and judicial cooperation, featured less in political coverage but they were equally crucial components of the agreement and important for the structure of a new European security architecture. As with trade, there was a palpable difference on these matters between Theresa May and Boris Johnson.

In her Mansion House speech on 2 March 2018, May performed a balancing act between hailing national sovereignty and shielding British jobs and manufacturing from using that sovereignty to diverge. Avoiding a negative economic impact by preserving supply chains, which was one of her tests for a good deal, required UK alignment to EU rules on goods, she thought, but as a compromise to avoid ruffling feathers with pro-Brexit members of her cabinet, the prime minister proposed “managed divergence” from EU rules. Civil servants in Whitehall dubbed it a “reverse Ukraine” agreement. Whereas Ukraine had committed to converge with the EU to gain correspondingly more market access over time, the UK wanted to diverge and accepted a gradual loss in ease of access to the EU market. There were three avenues for gradual divergence, May put forward. Sometimes the UK Parliament would adopt identical laws as the EU and UK courts would ensure consistency with the jurisprudence of the EU Court of Justice in such cases. Sometimes UK laws would achieve equivalent outcomes via different means and sometimes the UK would do its own thing. May gave the digital industry as an example of the latter. The outcome would be frictionless trade on goods with the EU, despite the UK's departure from the single market and customs union. Her Lancaster House speech a year earlier made that pledge of frictionless trade already. Now she proposed a method to get there, nicknamed “the three baskets” by commentators.

Apart from objecting on principle to giving the UK free movement of goods without free movement of people, which contradicted the Barnier staircase, the EU perceived a bureaucratic monster for the sole benefit of the UK. EU–UK committees would have to meet constantly to assess whether unilaterally decided UK rules diverged, with a potential for endless controversies and formal disputes on which rules were equivalent and which ones were not. Trade and businesses would face constant uncertainty. A bespoke deal was “administratively crazy”, the late Henrik Enderlein, a Berlin-based professor of political economy and director of the pro-EU Jacques Delors Centre, tweeted, whereas the Norway model was “politically crazy” for a large economy like the UK, which could hardly become a rule-taker.

“I am more pessimistic than at the start of our dinner”, European Commission president Jean-Claude Juncker told Prime Minister Theresa May on his way out of 10 Downing Street. It was late in the evening of 26 April 2017, nearly a year after the British people had voted to leave the European Union. A few weeks earlier, May had notified President Tusk of the European Council of the UK's departure planned for March 2019. The conversation between the prime minister and the Commission president started pleasantly. Juncker is good at small talk and putting people at ease. Michel Barnier, his Brexit negotiator, and his counterpart David Davis reminisced briefly about the 1990s when they represented France and the UK in the preparations for the Treaty of Amsterdam. By the time the EU leaders had signed the Treaty in 1997, French and British voters had kicked both politicians out of office and Tony Blair overturned John Major's opt-out of the EU's “social chapter”. Blair wanted to put the UK back “at the heart of Europe”.

Top British and EU aides attended the dinner conversation but purdah rules barred May's closest advisers and architects of her Brexit approach, Nick Timothy and Fiona Hill, from participating. Eight days before, May had come back from a hiking holiday in the Swiss Alps and announced early elections to bring “unity here in Westminster” and “make a success of Brexit”. Although the UK was now officially in an election campaign, Juncker and Barnier still went to London, as it was high time to sound out the UK's intentions. Three days later, the 27 EU leaders would meet in Brussels at a special Brexit summit for the adoption of their negotiation guidelines with the principles that would inform all EU positions.

The Downing Street dinner was the first occasion to compare the EU's approach with UK thinking. The elections would in any case not change much, people in Brussels thought, and most probably lead to a more effective Tory government until 2022, with a larger majority. Juncker's team liked that prospect. Tony Blair, whom Barnier met in Dublin on 11 May, predicted a landslide victory for May and urged Barnier to keep all options open nevertheless.

Boris Johnson took office on 24 July 2019. At first, Dominic Cummings, his political strategist, advised him to ignore the civil service “babbling” on Northern Ireland. Ignoring Brexit trade-offs and just getting it done required audacity instead of Theresa May's prudence, it seemed, and the approach during Johnson's first weeks in office aimed to make the EU budge and ditch the backstop. Mid-September that approach changed. Johnson's negotiator David Frost transmitted confidential papers to Barnier's team. At first, they just rehashed the alternative arrangements, aspiring to find vague solutions at an undefined moment in the future. EU experts chewed over the written material, which changed the dynamics of the talks from a sterile confrontation to probing the feasibility of UK ideas on customs and regulatory checks of food and manufactured goods. In a surprise announcement, Johnson's Conservative Party conference speech in Manchester proposed an all-island solution for regulatory compliance with EU standards for manufactured goods and accepted to treat Northern Ireland differently from the rest of the UK well before the endgame of negotiations.

Act 1: a cordial confrontation

In early July, Boris Johnson and Jeremy Hunt went head-to-head in the Tory leadership battle. Hunt stated the backstop had to change or go but added that a no-deal Brexit would be suicidal, which was a softer line than Johnson's “ditch the backstop” pledge and leave on 31 October, come what may. There was no need for this pledge to clinch the leadership contest, as few doubted Johnson would win. It looked as if he was setting himself up for confrontation.

There was speculation in Westminster whom Johnson would appoint as Brexit negotiator. Barnier was curious to understand the profile of the new prime ministerial team as a sign of where the story could go next after the bellicose rhetoric of the campaign. David Frost, whom Johnson appointed, was an enigma, however. He had experience in EU affairs. Frost had worked for the Foreign Office and been a diplomat in Brussels, representing the UK in the trade policy committee. Afterwards he was ambassador to Denmark. EU and Danish officials who knew him in those capacities mentioned his strong Euroscepticism. But outside of government, he had worked for the Scotch Whisky Association, which lobbied traditionally for a deepening of the EU single market and an ambitious EU trade policy to gain easier market access around the world.

In March 2018, the European Council adopted its guidelines for negotiating the future relationship and confirmed the April 2017 offer of a free trade agreement with zero tariffs and zero quotas on the condition of agreeing common standards on fair competition. EU leaders added that the UK had to respect the December 2017 agreement that Northern Ireland would align with EU rules in the absence of any other workable solution. Brexiters later criticized Theresa May for rejecting Donald Tusk's offer of a free trade area but omitted to mention it came with strings attached on Northern Ireland and a level playing field, which were not hidden in the fine print but part of the documents that EU leaders published.

Barnier's relationship models

Juncker and Barnier kicked off a discussion on the future relationship three months before, at the December 2017 European Council meeting, when EU leaders refrained from opening a conversation with the UK on the future, partly because of its immediate backtracking on the withdrawal agreement in political discourse. Macron and other leaders insisted on kicking off an internal EU discussion on what lied ahead. Barnier presented a slide that visualized the various models of third-country relationships the EU had already agreed (see Figure 6.1). The UK's red lines of not wanting any compromise on sovereign control of its laws, money and borders had it depicted as tumbling down a flight of stairs. EU membership was shown as the best relationship with the EU and marked at the top of the stairs. The second-best model was shown as Norway. Its membership of the single market facilitates trade and doing business across the Norwegian–EU border but obliges Norway to follow EU rules and jurisprudence. Norway pays for EU cohesion policy that accompanies the economic freedoms of the single market and accepts free movement of people. Such closeness to the EU, however, was not compatible with the UK's preferences.

Switzerland was placed one step lower than Norway. Just as Norway, Switzerland is in the Schengen area and respects free movement of EU nationals but the Commission and EU member states regarded Switzerland as an anomaly. It participates in the single market for some economic sectors, such as aviation, but not others, such as financial services.

“My red line is the unity of the EU27”, Barnier told prime ministers in 2016 at their first encounter. Towards the end of 2017, commentators, journalists and experts asked members of Barnier's team more frequently when this surprising unity would crack and dissolve. After so many years of divisions between member states, people assumed that EU unity was unnatural and unsustainable. The most important element that explains the unity was the sense of political responsibility of government leaders who thought that a divided reaction could endanger European integration. The unity grew in those first months since June 2016 on both the negotiation approach and substance. Institutionally, Tusk decided that Brexit was a matter for the 27 only, never to be discussed collectively with the UK prime minister. The preparatory work of Juncker, Barnier and his team, often working hand-in-hand with Council and national officials, resulted in a remarkably clear negotiation mandate for Barnier in May 2017.

EU decisions are often fragile compromises that can pay a price of ambiguity and complexity to overcome national divisions. In Brexit, unity led to clarity, which in turn sustained unity. That clarity reaffirmed founding principles on fundamental freedoms, the single market and the autonomy of the EU's legal and political order. Once adopted, it became hard for any member state to move away from them. Moreover, the principles created a take-itor-leave it situation for the UK on its withdrawal terms. In other words, it succeeded in putting the burden of sorting out the meaning of Brexit solely on the UK, which is what the EU wanted and ran contrary to what some UK politicians had expected.

The EU's unity was not just about politics. Collective policy learning based on Barnier's inclusive method of work was important. The first seminar on citizens’ rights between the Commission, national diplomats and MEPs in 2016 was the start of a search towards a consolidated EU position. Some national experts thought a mixed EU-national agreement was in order, as residency rights and social security are national competences.

During the many instances of political commotion, UK pundits claimed that the EU simply did not “get Northern Ireland” and failed to understand the place and its politics, which led it to design solutions skewed against the interests of the unionist community. The politics of Northern Ireland, however, is primarily the business of the UK and to some extent Ireland as co-guarantor of the Good Friday (Belfast) Agreement and its North–South cooperation. The EU entrusted the two signatory countries, Ireland and the UK, to ensure the full compatibility of the Brexit deal with the Good Friday Agreement. Could the UK have signed up and ratified the two agreed versions of the deal if they contradicted its international law obligations under the 1998 peace agreement? UK negotiators and governments had the support of top Whitehall lawyers to guarantee the compatibility between all of the UK's international obligations. Government lawyers never questioned the lawfulness of the Withdrawal Agreements in conversations with the EU. Politically, the UK government accepted the terms of the deal, which it recommended to Parliament. The accusation that the EU violated the Good Friday Agreement by ignoring unionist concerns is an odd one therefore, given the UK's own political and legal endorsement in 2019.

Saying the EU is not a signatory to the Good Friday Agreement does not downplay the need for Brussels to understand unionist concerns, which are key for the proper implementation of the agreed obligations. Since early 2018, Barnier's team went out of its way to have frequent contacts with a wide range of Northern Irish stakeholders and discuss the state of play of negotiations and possible ways forward. Whereas business leaders expressed qualms on what was coming out of the talks, the general feedback was that the solutions could work to the benefit of Northern Ireland's economy, with proper UK government support and preparation. Barnier himself was impressed on his visits to Northern Ireland by the discrepancy between the political polarization and the more pragmatic take from businesses and farming. His team often heard feedback from people in Northern Ireland that it gave them more information than London, at least until 2020.

“There is still scope for compromise”, the German chancellor Angela Merkel commented on the ongoing talks. In London, Prime Minister Boris Johnson declared “the trade talks are over”. It was 16 October 2020, two months before Johnson agreed to a deal. On that day, Michel Barnier said in a press conference in Brussels that he was ready to intensify talks. Simultaneously, David Frost, Johnson's negotiator, lamented in a tweet that the EU refused to accelerate negotiations. Barnier looked with incredulity at yet another bizarre situation created by a British government searching for a Potemkin confrontation. After ten days of standstill, talks resumed. “I am not sure why this political drama was needed”, Barnier told his team of a hundred EU negotiators who were eager to go back to work and conclude a deal. Brexit in London was a different tale from Brexit in Brussels.

Initially, the victory of the Leave vote in the June 2016 referendum caused a shock in Brussels. It happened one year after the EU overcame sharp divisions between member states in order to avoid “Grexit”, the exit of Greece from the eurozone. There were tensions between governments on migration flows and rule of law violations by Poland and Hungary. The crisis Brexit would cause “could and probably will dwarf them all”, said the BBC's Chris Morris on the day after the referendum. Many thought Morris was on point but the story turned out differently. The political crisis in London never crossed the channel. EU member states preferred to engage in fights with each other on migration, economic and monetary union, climate change, or the EU budget, to name but a few issues. For Brexit, the EU acted as a united club while Westminster tore itself apart. EU leaders concurred from the start on what to do and adopted a clear negotiation mandate for the European Commission and Michel Barnier. Paradoxically, the UK was less clear than the EU about what it wanted from Brexit, at least until December 2019 when Johnson won a comfortable majority and, in his words, “Bob's your uncle”.