Britain was now “outside the economic policies of the EU.”

 

 

It might even have been the day that the EU, as we have known it, ceased to exist. But for Europe’s leaders yesterday, all these unfortunate truths were at least partly concealed by making it the day for blaming Britain. “We have a very good result,” said the president of the European Parliament, Jerzy Buzek. “Twenty-six versus one.” An agreement of all 27 EU members, said France’s Nicolas Sarkozy, was impossible “thanks to our British friends.” Maybe he was just tired – it was 5am – but as he ground out the words, the French president’s lip seemed to curl. Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, told reporters: “I really don’t believe David Cameron was ever with us at the table.” In what seemed, at times, like the anti-British summit, lower-ranking figures circulated through the halls, turning up the rhetoric in the search for a scapegoat. Cameron had been “clumsy in his manoeuvring,” said one senior EU diplomat. Guy Verhofstadt, the former prime minister of Belgium, was on hand to tell us that Britain was now “outside the economic policies of the EU.” None of this is necessarily wrong. In the early hours of yesterday, by saying that he would not agree a treaty for closer eurozone “fiscal union” without safeguards for the City, Mr Cameron may indeed have brought Britain to a 50-year crossroads. But it is substantially beside the point.