Bulldog PM? Or friendless, vulnerable and ill-equipped

IT MIGHT have seemed bold, but did David Cameron go into the Brussels talks on Thursday night ill-equipped with the requisite negotiating tools (he had no aides with him in the room), friendless because he has never made any effort to nurture relations with other European leaders, and vulnerable to making a rash decision because the talks went on all night?

LACK OF NEGOTIATING SKILLS

Nick Clegg told Andrew Marr on BBC TV this morning that he was appalled to learn in the small hours of Friday that the late-night summit had “so spectacularly unravelled”.

According to The Independent on Sunday, sources close to Clegg say he couldn’t believe Cameron hadn’t tried to play for more time.

Others have questioned whether Cameron even has the negotiating skills to deal with such a tricky situation. A senior Lib Dem told the Independent: “We basically went in and said, ‘If you don’t do as we want, we will shoot ourselves in the head”.

The same article also claims Brussels insiders were left ”gobsmacked” by Cameron’s all-or-nothing negotiating tactics.

Lord (Peter) Mandelson said: “Tony Blair would never end up in that position. He would have prepared something long beforehand to get from the negotiation and stayed there until he got it”. Jonathan Powell, Blair’s former chief of staff, was similarly disbelieving. He called it “the worst foreign policy disaster in my adult lifetime.”

NO FRIENDS IN EUROPE

Sarkozy and Merkel’s unwillingness to compromise with Britain was partly the result of Cameron’s inability to make friends among the European leaders, says Andrew Rawnsley in The Observer. “His complete lack of friends in Brussels starkly reveals that he has not nurtured vital relationships with other key actors”.

As Rawnsley points out, it is usual for leaders to understand one another’s need to be able to go home having won something at the negotiating table. This is when past favours are remembered and deals done. But no one in Brussels thought they owed Cameron any favours. Angela Merkel said afterwards: “I really don’t believe Cameron was ever with us at the table”.

One key reason for Cameron’s poor relations with Merkel and Sarkozy was his 2009 decision to remove the Conservative party from the European People’s Party (EPP) bloc in the European parliament – a bloc that includes most mainstream centre-right parties, including Merkel’s Christian Democrats and Sarkozy’s UMP.

As result, Cameron was not invited to a crucial pre-summit gathering in Marseille where Sarkozy, Merkel and other EPP leaders laid out their positions ahead of the Brussels meeting.

The decision to pull the Tories out of the EPP dates back to a promise Cameron made to his party’s eurosceptics in order get one over his rival David Davis when he was fighting for the Tory leadership in 2005.

THE LATE-NIGHT RISK

David Cameron was drawn into a textbook negotiating ruse for wearing down obstinate parties, according to Derk-Jan Dijk, professor of sleep and physiology at the University of Surrey. “There is a reason people push these negotiations into the night,” Professor Dijk told The Sunday Telegraph. “It is a mechanism by which a decision can be forced."

Dijk explained that the brain gets tired and begins taking risks "because it wants to get out of that difficult situation... the decision may simply have been made because the brain maybe just wants to go to sleep".

Lawyers and bankers often work through the night to force through a deal in this way, according to the Telegraph. When Alistair Darling was chancellor in the depths of the 2008 banking crisis, he called bankers to Friday night talks that became known as "the long weekend". By Sunday night, the exhausted bank chiefs had accepted the Government's bailout plan.

The Conservative historian Robin Harris, writing elsewhere in The Sunday Telegraph, deemed Cameron’s performance in Brussels “brave and stylish”. But there is one drawback to the Cameron style, said Harris. “He seems constitutionally incapable of thinking through his relations with his party, or his wider policy aims, in depth or in advance. It is this aspect of his premiership that will now have to change – and quickly.” ·