Julian King has an unofficial and peculiar title, at least for the foreseeable future. He is the UK’s last EU commissioner.
Looking at where matters stand five years on from Brexit, he is hopeful a promised reset of relations between the UK and the EU has started to pick up pace.
Both sides are keen to strike side deals on top of the agreements governing Britain’s relationship with the bloc, which were negotiated over several, painful years.
“The level of contact is speeding up. The tone has definitely changed ... shifted into a more positive and warm and open, forward-looking tone,” King says.
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Always a cautious operator, British prime minister Keir Starmer was careful not to move too quickly after the Labour government took office last July.
The UK is interested in a deal on defence co-operation, measures to tackle illegal migration, and the removal of border checks on goods such as meat, dairy and livestock sold from Britain into the EU.
EU states want to roll over rights to fish in British waters and a youth mobility scheme, where young people would be able to travel between the EU and UK to study or work for a few years.
Starmer is to host the 27 EU leaders for what will amount to a reset summit in May. There is an expectation that by that point clearer negotiating stalls will be set out.
“There’s a lot of detail to be worked through now. I think it’s positive that they’re setting themselves a sort of timetable and an agenda for trying to take things forward,” King says.
In an interview with The Irish Times in Brussels this week, King says the previous Brexit deals, struck after lengthy negotiations, should be seen as the floor rather than the ceiling. “The world has changed. There are a lot of new challenges, particularly on security and defence,” he says.
The trick for Starmer will be how to stage manage any move towards closer ties with the EU, without reigniting the Brexit firestorm that for years engulfed Westminster politics.
“The British press is very quick to award points and very critical of anywhere where it perceives that the UK has given ground. I don’t think that’s going to change any time soon,” King says.
As EU commissioner for security from 2016 to 2019, King was part of the European Commission’s political leadership when the bloc’s executive was locked in bitter negotiations with Britain’s then Conservative government on the terms of their exit.
A former British ambassador to Ireland and director general of the Northern Ireland Office, he did not need to be read into the sensitivities of how Brexit might affect the border between the Republic and Northern Ireland or arrangements between Northern Ireland and Britain.
King was not directly involved in the talks led by the EU’s chief Brexit negotiator, Michel Barnier, but Jean-Claude Juncker, who was commission president, at times sought King’s view.
[ UK-EU relations ‘must move away from perception of winners and losers’, minister says ]
“Jean-Claude Juncker would occasionally invite comments from around the table on how people felt things were going and perceptions of what was happening in different countries, not just the UK,” King says. “So at times [former commissioner] Phil Hogan and I would be asked to comment on particular aspects of negotiation, if they touched upon Ireland and the UK.”
The Irish government at the time succeeded in getting the EU to make preventing a return to any hard border on the island a redline issue.
“It’s entirely legitimate that the Irish government made its arguments. Those arguments were going to get a sympathetic hearing because Ireland was a member of the European Union and the UK was leaving,” King says.
As the Northern Ireland executive was not up and running during the period, it meant it was more difficult to get the concerns of unionists across in the talks, he says.
King’s term as EU commissioner was up in late November 2019. Given the UK was to formally leave the union two months later, he was not replaced. “In one sense I was just focusing on doing my job, obviously when you step back from it a little bit it was a particular moment in history,” he says.
“As somebody who has always been basically pro-European, it was tinged with a good deal of sadness for me. We were coming to the end of that stage of that part of the relationship between the UK and the EU.”
The former diplomat says jokingly that his departure from the commission’s Berlaymont headquarters was “slightly less dramatic” than Chris Patten leaving Hong Kong as the last UK governor, when the territory was returned to Chinese control in 1997.
“Here I packed a cardboard box in my room, came down, had a beer in the bar across the way with some journalists and got on the metro to go home. So it was a bit more real,” King says. “Although it was a very important moment in the history of the UK’s engagement with the EU, it was only one moment.”
