Boris Johnson Once Mocked the Eurocrats of Brussels. They Haven’t Forgotten.

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/10/world/europe/boris-johnson-brussels-trade-brexit.html

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LONDON — Three decades ago, an enterprising young foreign correspondent named Boris Johnson reported that the European Commission planned to blow up Berlaymont, its hulking, asbestos-riddled headquarters in Brussels. “Sappers will lay explosive charges at key points,” he wrote in The Daily Telegraph.

On Wednesday, Mr. Johnson, now Britain’s prime minister, walked into Berlaymont, still very much standing after a costly renovation, for dinner with the commission’s current president, Ursula von der Leyen. “You run a tight ship here, Ursula,” he said when she ordered him to put on a mask after posing for cameras.

To say the moment was rich in symbolism doesn’t begin to capture the dense layer-cake of metaphors: a journalist-turned-politician, who made his name by ridiculing and deriding the European Union — often bending the truth in the process — returning to the scene of his youthful journalistic escapades, in search of a trade agreement with the European bureaucrats he once mocked.

Ms. von der Leyen served Mr. Johnson pumpkin soup with scallops, steamed turbot with mashed potatoes, and pavlova with exotic fruit for dessert. But she sent him on his way without a breakthrough in the trade talks and served notice that the European Union was not likely to bend.

He seemed to get the message: On Thursday he said there was a “strong possibility” that Britain would leave the European Union without a trade deal.

“What goes around comes around, doesn’t it?” said Sonia Purnell, who worked with Mr. Johnson in The Telegraph’s Brussels bureau in the 1990s and later wrote a critical biography of him. “The E.U. is not going to give up on its own rules. It’s foolish and time-wasting for him to expect it to do otherwise.”

With the negotiations over a post-Brexit trade agreement coming down to a frantic few weeks before the Dec. 31 deadline, Mr. Johnson’s checkered legacy in Brussels has become a hurdle. He remains a deeply unpopular figure there, blamed by many for stoking anti-Europe sentiment with his inflammatory journalism and for using Brexit to advance his subsequent political career.

Even now, critics said, Mr. Johnson is obsessed with placating the Brexit hard-liners in his Conservative Party, uninterested in economic arguments about the impact of leaving the bloc without a trade deal and out of touch with the Brussels of today.

“He left in 1994 and he’s not been back very much since,” said Charles Grant, director of the Center for European Reform, a research institute, who, as a correspondent for The Economist, competed against Mr. Johnson.

“He’s anathema to most E.U. politicians, who see him as personally to blame for Brexit, so he doesn’t have much of a network there,” Mr. Grant added.

Like many of Mr. Johnson’s articles in that era, there was a germ of truth to the one about blowing up Berlaymont. The building was rife with asbestos, and European authorities debated how to handle it. But using troops trained in demolition to wire the building for an explosion was never in the cards, especially since it would only have spread an asbestos cloud around the city (it was renovated instead).

Mr. Johnson took similar liberties with the European Union’s myriad regulations, which he presented as a nanny state dictating the minutiae of daily life. One article was about Europe-wide specifications for condoms; another carried the headline, “Brussels recruits sniffers to ensure that Euro-manure smells the same.”

“Boris hammed it up and made it worse — or better depending on your point of view,” said Jonathan Faull, a former senior official at the European Commission who was working there during Mr. Johnson’s time in Brussels.

For all his factually challenged assertions, Mr. Johnson’s reporting was rooted in a genuine understanding of how the European bureaucracy worked, which went back to his father, Stanley, who worked as an official at the European Commission in the 1970s.

The younger Mr. Johnson went to the European School in Brussels, where he picked up French and mixed with the children of “eurocrats” on the same leafy campus where Ms. von der Leyen later studied.

“Ursula and I were at school together,” Mr. Johnson said when they met in London last January to kick off the trade negotiations.

“Same school, but not the same time,” she corrected him.

In the Bildungsroman of Mr. Johnson’s life, his chapter as a journalist in Brussels occupies a particular place. It was there, people who knew him said, that he discovered the intellectual allure of “euroskepticism” and the payoff that came with bashing European institutions. Years later, he likened the experience to “chucking these rocks over the garden wall.”

“I listened to this amazing crash from the greenhouse next door over in England as everything I wrote from Brussels was having this amazing, explosive effect on the Tory Party,” Mr. Johnson told the BBC. “And it really gave me this, I suppose, rather weird sense of power.”

Now, Mr. Johnson finds himself at the head of a party that he has remade along hard-core euroskeptic lines. As he weighs whether to compromise with the European Union, he must consider the blowback — the “amazing, explosive effect” — a deal would arouse in his party’s ranks.

“Setting up sovereignty as the issue and interpreting the result of the referendum as a mandate for no interference is not the way the world works — unless you want to be North Korea,” Mr. Faull said.

Not all the blame for the impasse should fall on Mr. Johnson, he and other analysts say. Some said they were surprised the European Union seemed intent on preventing him from talking directly to leaders like President Emmanuel Macron of France.

“It’s interesting, and kind of worrying, that given the stakes, that Johnson and Macron don’t sit down like adults and have that conversation,” said Mujtaba Rahman, an analyst at the political risk consultancy Eurasia Group.

But even if Mr. Johnson breaks through the barriers in Brussels, analysts said, his approach is likely to reflect the ideas he has promoted throughout a career as a journalist and politician: One of those is the misplaced notion that the European Union will always compromise in the end.

“Boris Johnson and some of those around him genuinely believe that, if you are very tough, and push hard enough, then the E.U. will cave in,” Mr. Grant said.