It was the European Commission’s own vote of no-confidence in Theresa May.
Top EU officials rolled out the red carpet for Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn on Thursday, welcoming May’s arch-rival to the Commission headquarters and giving him a platform at a sensitive stage in the Brexit talks.
Corbyn, who has criticized May and her Conservative Party for mismanaging Brexit, has yet to unveil a credible departure plan of his own. But after being welcomed for meetings with the EU’s top negotiator, Michel Barnier, and Commission Secretary-General Martin Selmayr, Corbyn seized on the moment to present himself as a credible substitute for the prime minister.
Labour Party operatives gathered a large scrum of journalists outside the Berlaymont building, the Commission headquarters, where Corbyn said he had used his meetings to present the Labour perspective on Brexit. He insisted he is not meddling in the negotiations and said EU officials did not offer any response to his statements.
“We’re obviously not negotiating; we’re not in government, we’re the opposition,” Corbyn said. “But I think he [Barnier] was interested to know what our views are and the six tests we’ve laid down by which we will hold our government, the British government, to account.”
From the Berlaymont to No. 10 Downing Street, it was a day of red-faced discomfort on Brexit.
By all accounts, EU leaders had no intention of provoking or humiliating May when they rejected her Brexit plan at a summit in Salzburg, Austria last week.
But it was hard to see anything but provocation and humiliation in granting such an audience to Corbyn just after the Labour Party conference and as May prepares for a hugely contentious party congress of her own.
EU officials sought to play down the significance of the meetings, saying that Corbyn had requested the visit and in the words of one official “it would have been equally awkward” to refuse to see him. In a tweet, Barnier portrayed it as an exercise in “listening to all views.”
An EU official confirmed that Corbyn had updated Barnier on the Labour Party’s thinking following its conference, and said that Barnier in turn had explained the state of play of the negotiations, emphasizing “that the October European Council will be the key moment in terms of reaching decisive progress on all outstanding” withdrawal issues, including a contingency plan for the Ireland border.
The official said that Barnier also noted there are “positive elements” in May’s plan “but that more work needs to be done on the economic side.”
But by putting out the welcome mat for May’s political nemesis, the EU’s top brass sent a clear message that their contingency planning now includes preparing for the real possibility of May’s ouster from office. And they opened themselves up to potential criticism of interfering in U.K. domestic politics — something the Commission studiously avoids in any EU nation.
Even if the EU didn’t want to send the message that “the enemy of my enemy is my friend,” it is clear that at the very least Brussels has lost faith in May’s ability to hold her Conservative Party ranks together and prevent a no-deal, crash-out scenario. Corbyn and his Labour MPs could well prove crucial on that front, if and when a withdrawal treaty comes to a vote.
May, however, wasn’t the first one left red-faced by Corbyn’s unlikely itinerary in the EU capital.
The Commission’s chief spokesman, Margaritis Schinas, insisted at his daily midday news conference that he knew nothing about a meeting between Corbyn and Selmayr, who is Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker’s most trusted adviser and is widely perceived — fairly or not — as the most powerful anti-British voice in the upper echelons of the Commission.
The sparring over the Corbyn-Selmayr meeting was one of the more bizarre exchanges between Schinas and the Brussels press corps considering that many news outlets were already reporting it based on briefings from the British side.
Perhaps the only one who wasn’t left with something to blush about was Corbyn, who capitalized on the visit as an opportunity to portray himself as a credible future prime minister, to once again trash May and the Tories over their handling of Brexit, and to draw the EU into Britain’s internal politics, which could well derail negotiations and prompt a new election.
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For Corbyn, who has wavered and waffled about how he would vote in a hypothetical second referendum, the visit was a useful distraction from his own failure to unite the Labour Party around a common position on Brexit. Some in his camp have called for a second referendum in hopes of canceling Brexit altogether; others ardently favor a hasty exit.
At his party conference, Corbyn argued that Labour should be given the opportunity to negotiate a better Brexit, even though his own proposals seem no more plausible than May’s now tattered Chequers plan.
If Barnier was hoping to use the visit as an intelligence-gathering exercise, to gain a better sense of current thinking in the House of Commons, the spectacle of welcoming May’s rival in Brussels at such a sensitive moment in the talks was at best indiscreet and at worse an intentional affront, designed to strong-arm the U.K. negotiators at a moment of weakness.
In a clear sign of how provocative the meeting may seem to May’s supporters, Corbyn even used his press conference to entertain the possibility of a new national election, in answering a question about whether he would need to delay the March 29 deadline for the U.K.’s departure in order to implement his own Brexit plan.
“Obviously it depends when the election is, what the scenario would be,” Corbyn said. “We would want to maintain a relationship with Europe around the six tests that [Shadow Brexit Secretary] Keir [Starmer] has clearly set out on behalf of the Labour Party. By the way, the origins of those six tests all come from the government in the first place.”