Labour has spent 10 years trying to sabotage Brexit. Now it is finally getting its way

Telegraph

17-05-2025

It was October 2020. Britain was descending into another Covid lockdown, and my talks with the EU were getting bogged down too. I was about to do a video call with Michel Barnier, their chief negotiator, and we were furious at an incredible statement just put out by EU leaders telling Britain to make the 'necessary moves' to reach an agreement in line with the EU's position. The EU seemed determined to hold us in their grip.
Barnier came on the screen. From my office overlooking Downing Street, and with my team around me, I told him that if this was the EU view, then there was nothing to discuss, and there was no point in him coming to London for the next round of talks, or indeed any talks in future. Barnier was staggered. I had to repeat the message several times before it sank in. We briefed out: 'Get ready for no deal.'
Within a week, the EU had turned round 180 degrees. Barnier read out a form of words in the European Parliament which our team had written for him and agreed with Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen. The EU was open to compromise after all. It would work intensively to find solutions. The talks were back on, the work intensified, and a deal was reached.
Toughness works.
On Monday, that same von der Leyen will meet Sir Keir Starmer to sign off Britain's 'reset' with the EU. Sadly, there is little evidence of similar robustness on the British side this time round. All will be sweetness and light. Von der Leyen will repeat some of her gushing words about Sir Keir from Time magazine last month. She can afford to. For the truth will be that Britain will have conceded a lot and got very little back for it.
How we got here
It can be hard to work out what's at stake. Let's begin by looking back. Most of Britain's politicians were stunned by the referendum result. But once Theresa May effectively lost the 2017 election, they saw they could hope at least to keep Britain closely aligned to EU laws and politics – close to nurse for fear of something worse.
Meanwhile, Brexiteers rapidly also united around the view that Brexit did not make sense unless it was done properly. There was no point in leaving the EU if we allowed them to carry on setting our laws. We, Great Britain and Northern Ireland, had to be out of everything – customs, trade, budget, the EU court and laws – if we were to do things our way.
Brexit, since then, has been about where to settle on this spectrum. At one end lies EU control: a nation bound by Brussels's rules, with no say in their creation – a vassal state. At the other is freedom and independence: a Britain that sets its own laws on its own terms. This has been the battleground.
So far, there have been three battles over this terrain. The 'reset' is the fourth. The first was during the May government. She tried to exit formally but stay in many of the EU's rules. Her poor deal on Northern Ireland left the province under EU trading rules come what may, and her 'Chequers plan' shows she always intended the same would happen to the rest of the UK too. It kept us very close to EU control. That's why, when the deal was signed, one of the EU negotiating team was caught on a BBC camera saying, 'We've got our first colony'.
Rightly, that deal collapsed in Parliament, and the second battle began. The Tory party turned to Boris Johnson and to me as his negotiator. Labour, led on Brexit issues by Starmer, saw the chance to reverse the referendum result entirely. The Brexit roulette wheel was set to 'winner takes all'.
As so often happened, they underestimated Boris. We reworked the smoking rubble of May's deal, got the country out of the EU, and then negotiated a free trade agreement. Parliament's ban on a no-deal exit meant we had to accept most of her dreadful Northern Ireland agreement, though always provisionally. With that exception, we re-established British freedom and independence.
Then came battle number three. The Northern Ireland arrangements soon collapsed, as we feared they might, under aggressive handling by the EU. Boris and Liz Truss decided to sweep away the whole Northern Ireland Protocol, whether the EU liked it or not. If this had happened, the Brexit job would have been done for good. But both lost their jobs first. Rishi Sunak lost his nerve instead and bought a quiet life, first by accepting the Northern Ireland deal, cosmetically renaming it the Windsor Framework, and then by leaving most inherited EU laws on our national statute book.
This locked Britain into an increasingly difficult position. Every time we try to diverge from EU laws, we open a gap between one part of the country and another. It's easier just to follow what the EU does, and so we are slowly back on the road to EU control. We always knew this was the risk if we couldn't get rid of the Protocol. I vividly remember being told by one of Barnier's team that if we annoyed the EU, 'You won't be able to move a single kilo of butter into Northern Ireland unless we say so'. That threat remains, and now the EU has the upper hand.
It's against this background that the Labour Government has now begun the fourth battle. They can't rejoin for now, but they can take us, step by step, farther back towards alignment and control – to Chequers or worse. This 'reset' will be the first such step. If they get away with it, more will follow.
That's where we stand. For a time, Boris and I blew open the establishment consensus that Britain couldn't survive on its own. We thought we had achieved escape velocity. But now the EU tractor beam is pulling us back.
Guilty men (and women)
In this the EU is helped by a British establishment that never gave up. Overwhelmingly they hated Brexit. Their national strategy, based around a special relationship with the Americans and closer integration with the Europeans, was destroyed in a few months in 2016. But they were determined to make Brexit as difficult as possible and wait for better days. So, sadly, many politicians, of all parties, put their loyalty to the EU above their loyalty to Britain.
Starmer and friends would regularly jet over to Brussels to tell Barnier how best to resist British demands. Starmer wanted to overturn the biggest vote for anything in our history by demanding a second referendum. They undermined Britain in the Brexit crisis, and now they are doing the same again.
Too many senior civil servants took the same view and didn't think we could manage on our own. I remember one, still prominent today, telling Boris and me he could find ways to help us 'manage' our manifesto commitment to leave the EU's customs union. Whitehall's technocrats are frightened of freedom and happy to trade it for the familiarity of EU control.
So, too, is big business. Entrepreneurs, new businesses, new industries, like the idea of deregulating and opening to the world. Big businesses are more sceptical. They want an easy life. That's the context for Boris's famous comment 'F--- business'. It wasn't about wealth creation. It was about organisations such as the CBI (Confederation of British Industry) and its members favouring their own corporate needs over wider British economic and political interests. Reliably on cue, the CBI came out on Friday to support the concessions in the 'reset'.
And finally, the Remainer activists have not given up. The cabal of retired bureaucrats, most of my former colleagues in the diplomatic service, the think-tankers who reliably ventriloquise the Brussels world view into our politics, all keep telling us that Brexit is a disaster, that the world is a dangerous place, and that the only safe thing to do is run to mummy in Brussels. Their sole critique of the Labour Government is that they are not 'ambitious' enough on the reset, too frightened of public opinion, too slow to bring us back into compliance. They have high hopes that the next few years will make British freedom and independence definitively impossible.
How does the reset fit in?
With all this energy behind them, Labour clearly thought the 'reset' would be straightforward. They naively assumed that the EU would grant them all kinds of concessions just because they had opposed Brexit in the first place. But the EU doesn't do negotiations like that. For British negotiators, positive atmospherics are an end in themselves. For the EU, they are a tool like anything else, a way of lulling their opposite numbers into making concessions.
Labour seemed to believe its own propaganda about the 2020 trade agreement. Echoing the Remain campaign groups, they told themselves that it was a bad deal that could be easily improved, rather than what it really was: the biggest, broadest and deepest free trade agreement done anywhere in the world. So they are finding they are having to give things away to produce a reset worth the name, and are falling into the same traps as May and Sunak as they do so.
They are beginning by accepting the EU's preconditions. It's a classic EU tactic: 'We won't talk unless you commit to X first.' In this case, X is abandoning the full control of our fishing grounds that was due to come, after a long transition, in 2026. Labour should have said no. But they won't walk away – so they had to say yes.
Second, they are negotiating on the EU's terms. Take one example. Labour says it wants to improve food and animal trade with the EU. There are two ways of doing this.
One is called 'equivalence': both sides agree their rules have broadly the same effect, for example as regards food safety, and therefore drop trade restrictions. Fine by me. We tried it in 2020, the EU refused, we ended the discussions.
The other way is the EU's way: drop trade barriers only if the other side applies EU rules and EU laws, ultimately enforced by the EU's courts, not just for selling into the EU, but in Britain too.
Labour briefly tried the first and were brushed off, as they should have expected. Instead of then saying, 'Fine, we'll stick with what we have,' they accepted the EU's approach and are getting ready to abandon control of our own entire agricultural and food system. Expect them to get some meaningless cosmetic concessions, but the reality will be clear: we will be operating under EU laws with essentially no say. Forget about agricultural innovation. Forget about cheaper high-quality food from elsewhere. We will be in the single market for agrifood, just as Northern Ireland already is.
Labour will be doing the same in other areas. They will be applying EU law on energy pricing, certainly via the Emissions Trading Scheme, and probably beyond this too. It's a drift back into the single market for energy. They will be accepting EU rules on carbon border adjustment measures – AKA tariffs, a clear customs measure. Labour's pledge to stay out of the single market and customs union is fraying at the edges. And making such substantive concessions in return for just warm words is not negotiation, it's capitulation.
If I were in charge: a winning strategy
What would I do differently if I were still calling the shots? Of course I don't see a reset as necessary in the first place. The trade agreement is working perfectly well. Britain is growing faster than France, Germany and the Eurozone. Our trade is performing well and we have a services trade boom. This year, we have joined the CPTPP, the big Pacific trade agreement, and have signed deals with the Indians and Americans. If international opinion looks askance at Britain, it's much more to do with the catastrophically bad management of the economy by Labour since last summer than anything to do with Brexit.
But if we had to do a reset? My starting point would be to be clear what the EU wants and put them under pressure. That's what we did in that grim autumn of 2020, and it was the EU which cracked, not us. Von der Leyen wanted a deal and Barnier did not. That's why, at the crucial moments, she was sending me her car to get into the Commission's basement car park and into the building via her private lift. Then we could have talks without Barnier knowing we were there – and she could make concessions without him realising.
This time, too, Britain has cards to play. It is the EU that wants a defence agreement, not us. It is the EU that wants a youth mobility scheme so it can export its unemployed young people to our labour market. We certainly shouldn't be paying to get them.
If we were to give any ground in this area – and, as I say, I don't think it is necessary – it should be to get something we actually want. Something like an end to checks on goods going to Northern Ireland. Or an equivalence deal on food exports. Better services trade access. A French commitment to take back arrivals here on small boats. Better practical access at borders: use of e-gates, an end to the 90-day limit on travel to the EU.
And under no circumstances would we give up control to the EU, its laws, and its courts: whether on fish, on trade, on migration, on energy pricing and net zero, not on anything. If that limited the scope of the deal, so be it.
Starmer has done the exact reverse. There is no attempt to balance advantage and concession. Like some dodgy used car salesman who just wants to get something off the forecourt, he's said to the EU: 'Take this defence agreement off my hands. You're doing me a favour, so I'll make it worth your while. I'll throw in British fishing grounds, open our borders to EU young people, and I'll join the single market for agriculture and energy too.'
It seems to make no sense – except in one way. Labour just wants to be closer to the EU. Starmer, Lammy, Reeves – the whole gang – would rejoin in a shot if they thought they could do it. For now, they aim to get closer, step by step. They don't really mind if the terms are bad for Britain. That's really not the point. The point is to move closer to Brussels. If that means a hopelessly unbalanced reset, then so much the worse for Britain.
So look carefully on Monday when this deal is unveiled. Labour are selling you a lemon. They will try to tell you a concession is an advantage and a loss of control is a benefit. They will try to present all opposition as obsessional determination to re-fight the Brexit wars.
In truth it is Labour which is reopening the Brexit wars. They aren't interested in a stable relationship with the EU from outside. Their next step will be to say, 'We are already aligning on one thing; why not another?' Then after that it will be, 'Why are we applying all these EU laws without any say? Wouldn't it be better to rejoin? ' It may take years. But the slide down the slippery slope is under way.
Not in our name
It is up to the Leave movement to expose this and to stop them going any farther down this road. Those Conservatives in proper touch with the party's traditions of standing up for the nation; Reform members who despair at not seeing Brexit done right; Labour members inheriting the proud tradition of Attlee, Bevin, Gaitskell and Shore, need to make clear this reset is 'not in our name'.
Conservatives and Reform were right to come together in Parliament on Tuesday and underline that a future government would take back any powers handed over this week. More than that will, of course, be needed – sweeping away the Windsor Framework (which the Tory Party currently supports), leaving the ECHR, leaving the Refugee Convention. The direction of travel must be made clear and, next time, the destination must be reached.
We must not give up on the free Britain Boris and I fought for. The Right's path is clear: harness the public's anger, channel it into a bold pro-sovereignty agenda, and deliver the Brexit Boris and I started. We may be in the tractor beam, but we still have rocket fuel in the tank. When this rotten Government and its shabby concessions are swept away, we must be ready: to take back control properly, get out of the EU's orbit, and build a Britain that's not a resentful protectorate, but a friendly neighbour: free, prosperous and proud.