A very short thread on “broken glass” and the vitriol directed against Merkel by the UK tabloids over the weekend.

Yesterday a Bloomberg reporter asked Merkel about the claims that her intransigence was holding up progress on the Brexit talks. /1

“What do you mean, ‘you’?” she replied, with the expression she usually reserves for questions about a Trump Twitter tirade. “Ah,” she then said, “that’s good to know. Look, I haven't done any negotiating at all ... the European Commission is conducting the negotiations.” /2

This is both true and a little disingenuous. As the chancellor of the EU’s largest country and the holder of the EuCo presidency Merkel has no formal role in the talks but a great deal of influence. She has been perfectly happy to negotiate directly with Johnson in the past... /3

... for example shortly after he became PM last summer, when he visited her in Berlin and cringeworthily declared “Wir schaffen das”. (It did not go terribly well.) /4

Where the vicious briefings from No 10 come unstuck though is the notion that the PM has an automatic right to try and divide and conquer through bilateral negotiations, particularly in the Brexit endgame, when the semblance unity matters more than ever to the EU side. /5

After all I suspect it would not be entirely to the Mail on Sunday’s taste if Michel Barnier were to go behind Johnson’s back and strike up talks with Steve Baker or another factional power-broker on the UK side. /ENDS

Postscript: there has been speculation on UK Twitter that the “crawling over broken glass” line was an allusion to the 1938 Kristallnacht pogrom. That is ultimately for Germans to judge but personally I just thought it was a nasty & thoughtless metaphor rather than a Nazi jibe.