How EU leaders are torn over Britain’s Brexit deal

From France to Finland, every EU member state has something to lose from a bad trade deal with Britain. Sean O’Grady explains what matters most to some of the major players

Where Angela Merkel and Emmanuel Macron agree is on the inviolability of the sacred single market (Getty)

Humiliation; party splits; a long recession; ridicule... the pressures on Boris Johnson to achieve a trade deal with the EU are very well known. Perhaps the only detail still missing is what his fiancee Carrie Symonds will say about the new fishing quotas and the role of the European Court of Justice. No doubt it will be leaked in due course.  

Yet while Brexit isn’t obsessing most of Europe in the way it has preoccupied Britain, there are still jobs and national pride at stake, and European leaders face their own domestic Brexit-related challenges.  

Thus far only President Macron has allowed talk of a national veto being applied to any Frost-Barnier accord. Maybe it is just for show and to demonstrate how hard he is fighting for les pecheurs (his government has privately advised the French fishing industry to brace itself for change); but a “non” to British ambitions has been used before, albeit in the other direction. General de Gaulle twice refused British membership, in 1961 and 1967, and when Britain finally signed up in 1972, the French people (not the British) had a referendum on the enlargement of the European Community.