Interview
'Lying is no longer a sin': former French
ambassador on Brexit and Boris Johnson
Jon Henley
in Paris
Exclusive: Sylvie Bermann, who has written book in
attempt to understand Brexit, says question of Britain’s identity was key
Sylvie Bermann photographed this week in Paris. ‘I’m
sorry, but France is sovereign. Germany is sovereign. When we decide to share
our sovereignty, it is to reinforce our power in the world.’ Photograph: Ed Alcock/The Guardian
Jon Henley
@jonhenley
Fri 26 Feb
2021 14.21 GMT
When Sylvie
Bermann arrived in August 2014 as France’s new ambassador, London was, she
says, a city of “extraordinary dynamism and optimism”.
French
cabinet ministers were queuing up to visit, one after the other, all searching
for “Britain’s recipe for success. It was an an astonishing place.”
Now,
Bermann says in an interview in her flat on Paris’s Left Bank, lined with the
souvenirs of 40 years in France’s diplomatic service, “It feels like I’ve lived
through a revolution. To see all that blown up, deliberately, for what? A blind
belief in some mythical idea … How did it happen?”
To answer
the question, the now-retired career diplomat, who has worked in Hong Kong, New
York, Brussels and Moscow and was France’s ambassador to Beijing before she
moved to Britain, has written a book that pulls no punches.
Goodbye
Britannia, published this month in France, calls Boris Johnson an inveterate
liar, describes Brexit as the triumph of emotion over reason, and suggests its
roots lie in a combination of deluded British exceptionalism and rank political
opportunism.
For a woman
who fell in love with Britain on her first visit, to Brighton to learn English
as a schoolgirl “sometime in the mid-1960s”, and whose best friends have lived
in London for more than 30 years, Brexit is also a matter of personal sadness.
“When
you’ve admired a country for a long time, appreciated its humour, tolerance,
courtesy, openness – of course it’s sad,” she says. “It also means, now,
there’s no more jelly or Stilton in Marks & Spencer’s in Marché St Germain.
And that’s Brexit, too.”
First and
foremost, though, was the shock. “No one thought it would happen, not even the
Brexiters,” Bermann says. “David Cameron told me several times there was no way
he could lose – he just wanted to solve his problem with his Eurosceptics.”
At endless
embassy lunches and receptions, she says, she was assured by all that “‘the
British are pragmatic; we just won’t do this’. One very senior Brexiter told
us: ‘We’re not leaving, and we’ll keep annoying you. Are you sure you want us
to stay?’”
Right up
until referendum night, Bermann says, the story was the same: “I went to the
party hosted by Roland Rudd, from the Stronger In campaign. George Osborne came
by at about 11pm, and everyone congratulated each other. People were sure.”
Bermann
went back to the French residence, on Kensington Palace Gardens, got a couple
of hours’ sleep, then went downstairs at about 5am to watch the final results
with her staff. “It was,” she says, “a bombshell. I wanted to analyse the
reasons.”
Bermann
blames a toxic mix of largely concocted fears over immigration, populist
politicians willing to exploit them, and an identity crisis by which a nation
that “not so long ago ruled the waves, somehow convinced itself it was in a
dictatorship”.
The
question of Britain’s identity was key, she says. “It’s very strange. On the
one hand the British say, ‘We’re the best, we hold all the cards, we’ll divide
and rule as we always have – and on the other: we’re a vassal state to
Brussels.”
She spent a
lot of time trying to talk to Brexiters, “and it was impossible – not to
convince them, even, but simply to … discuss it with them. This really is an
ideology. Brexit was a victory of passion over reality.”
The
national narrative of a country never defeated, and uninvaded since 1066, had –
according Bermann - created a “mad” and obsessive conviction among Brexit true
believers that Britain had single-handedly won the second world war.
“Look, I
did a lot to acknowledge the role of the British in the war,” she says. “I
presented a lot of légions d’honneur to British veterans, and it was very
moving. But at the same time, I’m sorry, the Americans and the Red Army did
their bit.”
A lack of
any real understanding of what the EU contributed to the UK did not help the
remain cause, she says, nor did the fact that the campaign was so lacklustre.
“Cameron said people would be better off in – but he never said how,” Bermann
says.
It was “the
demagogues and the populists”, however, who got Brexit over the line, Bermann
says. “Farage managed to forge this link between the EU and immigration.
[Jeremy] Corbyn played a very negative role too, he was a Brexiter at heart.
“There was
no opposition campaign. And then of course Johnson, the determining factor.
Charming, charismatic – and with no genuine reason at all to be hostile to the
EU. He knew all those articles he wrote about it from Brussels were false.”
Bermann has
few kind words for the role the prime minister, whom she met often during his
time as mayor of London, played in the Brexit process. From the moment he
started to campaign for Brexit, she says, his bad faith was evident.
“No one
should be surprised he gets called a liar,” she says. “Just look at the side of
that bus: a flagrant lie. But lying is no longer a sin. The views of someone
with no competence are worth as much as those of an expert – as Michael Gove
said.”
Bermann was
all the more shocked by Johnson, she says, because the first time she met him,
at a breakfast, he had given “a fine speech, about how Sparta, in ancient
Greece, had vanished because it cut itself off, while Athens, open city,
flourished”.
She had
more time for Theresa May, whose “inflexibilities and mistakes” – including the
red lines of Brexit means Brexit, leaving the EU’s single market and customs
union – produced the hardest of hard departures but who “at least had an honest
side”.
Bermann
left London in 2017, but followed developments closely from her next – and
final – diplomatic post in Moscow. “The deal that was finally arrived at is a
deal in which Britain sacrificed everything to a mythical idea of sovereignty,”
she says.
“I’m sorry,
but France is sovereign. Germany is sovereign. When we decide to share our
sovereignty, it is to reinforce our power in the world, because there are now
two superpowers, the US and China. Absolute sovereignty simply does not exist.”
Global
Britain is also a myth: “The UK has erected new barriers with its biggest
partner. For the US, it’s no longer the bridge it was. With China, there are
moral problems. India won’t play unless it gets visas. Who will Britain be
global with?”
Meanwhile,
Britain is now a third country, Bermann says, “which means frontiers,
documents, declarations. It wanted to leave because of EU bureaucracy, but it
has a mountain of new paperwork – and companies are already suffering.”
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