For a man who once warned his party to “stop banging on about Europe,” David Cameron has been doing a lot of banging on about Europe. The run-up to Friday night’s deal on reforming the U.K’s relationship with the EU saw silence, procrastination, a grand plan ridiculed by the right-wing British press, the topic bumped off the schedule of summit after summit, a whirlwind tour of European capitals and, finally, something that Cameron says he can take back to the British people and sell with all his “heart and soul.” Just two shirts into his planned “three-shirt” weekend, Cameron proclaimed victory, saying the deal had “delivered on the commitments I made at the beginning of this renegotiation process. Britain will be permanently out of ever closer union, never part of a European superstate.” Everyone else proclaimed victory, too, in a finale predicted by Dalia Grybauskaitė, Lithuania’s president, who said before the talks even began that “everybody would have its own drama, and then we will agree.” That’s just how it played out. Cameron arrived at the summit on Thursday full of patriotic talk of “battling for Britain.” At 5:30 a.m Friday he trudged out of the Council’s unlovely headquarters without saying a word. A spokesman filled in the gap: “It’s hard going.” The late night — European Council President Donald Tusk was there until 7 a.m — and the need to spend the morning hours on Friday brokering agreements between Britain and various other countries meant the second summit day’s planned breakfast became brunch, then became lunch, then late lunch, then afternoon tea, and finally dinner. The official meal — at which the final deal was agreed — was so long in coming that German Chancellor Angela Merkel made a quick trip to a nearby snack stand for a cone of Belgium’s beloved _frites_, what the French call fries and the Brits call chips. Once again, the migration crisis had derailed Cameron’s — and the caterers’ — plans. Austria’s hard line took attention away from Cameron at a six-hour dinner and debate. The Austrians want to cap the number of migrants allowed in, the Commission’s migration chief said that was illegal. But after that dispute was finally disposed of by EU leaders in the early hours of Friday morning, the sticking points for Cameron remained. Getting past them required a day of back-t0-back bilaterals — meetings between Tusk and European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker and various intransigent heads of state or government. “It was a strange Council in the way things have been handled,” said a French diplomat who was present during the talks. “We had a text which was very far from being final, so the heads of state had to be involved, but it’s impossible for 28 to negotiate. There were a lot of bilateral talks. The papers went around, but sometimes not at the same time. It was very complicated.” France and Belgium were worried about Cameron’s desire to get Britain out of its commitment to an “ever closer union.” France was also concerned that British attempts to protect non-eurozone countries in the EU’s single market could amount to special treatment for the City of London. And, top of the list, the Central European Visegrád Group, seemingly rejuvenated by the Brexit debate, was pushing back against British calls to restrict benefits for EU migrants. The frustrations remained, too. Cameron — who had declared he was “very suspicious of Brussels” — was consistently late: late in drawing up his plans; late handing them over to Tusk; late turning up for meetings, or not turning up for them at all. Plus, there was the nagging feeling that Cameron had turned a Conservative Party squabble — perhaps _the_ Conservative Party squabble — into an international event. That was Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn’s view, shared by his comrades in the Greek government. TROUBLE FROM THE START The road to agreement was long. Back in January 2013, Cameron, under pressure from the Tory right and terrified by a surge in support for the United Kingdom Independence Party, committed himself to renegotiation and referendum. In what became known as his “Bloomberg speech” he invoked World War II — “the skies of London lit by flames night after night” — before calling for a changed EU “to deliver prosperity and to retain the support of its peoples.” “Democratic consent for the EU in Britain is now wafer thin,” he said. “It is time for the British people to have their say. It is time to settle this European question in British politics. I say to the British people: This will be your decision.” The pro-Europe Liberal Democrats, the (very) junior government coalition partner, were having none of it. Almost a year to the day after the Bloomberg speech, Cameron returned to the subject, unveiling a plan for changing Europe. He said that, if re-elected in 2015 with a majority in parliament, he would hold an In/Out referendum before the end of 2017. No one, Cameron included, thought that would happen. But it did and in May 2015 Cameron’s Tories won the general election outright, shedding themselves of their bothersome Liberal Democrat coalition hangers-on. Not only that, but UKIP, thanks to the U.K.’s first-past-the-post electoral system, had just one MP to show for their three million votes. Cameron now had no need to hold an EU referendum at all — UKIP was a busted flush, and Cameron had announced he wouldn’t stay on for a third term as party leader and prime minister. He had little to gain from a referendum and an awful lot to lose: He didn’t want to be the prime minister who took the U.K. out of the EU. It was, however, too late to turn back. By the time of a European Council in June 2015, the U.K.’s renegotiation efforts were on the agenda (sort of). Under the heading “U.K.” in the draft conclusions, the page was blank. It would stay that way for some months, at least in part because of Europe’s struggles to cope with the migration crisis, which got in the way not only at summits but also at smaller gatherings of leaders. The British issue was pushed to the side again at a summit in September, with Cameron and Tusk deciding that the state-of-play would become clearer at a meeting of EU leaders a month later. It didn’t. The referendum discussion was reduced to a brief “introductory point” lasting a few minutes during the October summit. The talk was sandwiched between mention of the Economic and Monetary Union and the COP21 climate change conference, leaving more time for leaders to discuss migration. It was decided that Cameron would not set out his reform plans until another gathering of EU heads of state and government in December. By that stage, there was mounting frustration at Cameron’s inaction. The leader of the Liberal Democrats, Tim Farron, told POLITICO that Cameron’s approach to the referendum was “about as unstrategic as you can get.” In the absence of any actual EU reform demands from Westminster, staff at the Commission and Council had been reduced to testing hypothetical scenarios of what the British might want. They were forced to rely on speeches and the Conservative Party manifesto for guidance, according to an official. WISH LIST They got their answer on November 10, 2015. Cameron detailed his demands in a letter to Tusk. They focused on four areas: * Protecting the single market for Britain and other non-eurozone countries. * Boosting competitiveness. Cameron said he wanted to “write competitiveness into the DNA of the whole European Union” by cutting the burden on business. * Allowing Britain to opt out of the EU’s ambition to forge an “ever closer union” and strengthening the role of national parliaments. * Restricting access to benefits for EU migrants. He said he wanted to stop those coming to the U.K. from claiming certain benefits until they had been a U.K. resident for four years. Criticism was quick to follow. Brussels was disappointed at a lack of detail; Euroskeptics bemoaned the lack of ambition. UKIP’s Nigel Farage, inevitably, said the prime minister asked for “almost nothing” of substance from Brussels. At the end of November, Tusk and Cameron took time out from an EU-Turkey migration summit to gauge the progress the British prime minister had made in trying to get fellow EU leaders onside with his demands, and to see if the issue could make it on to the agenda for a December 17-18 meeting of EU leaders. In a letter to member countries, Tusk said Cameron could expect EU leaders’ response to his proposed changes by February, with “substantive political debate” and more explanation from Cameron required at the December 17-18 summit. He said there was “no consensus” on Cameron’s “most delicate” proposal: the four-year ban on in-work benefits for EU migrants. To fix that, Cameron began to rack up the air miles, shuttling from EU capital to EU capital to put his case for reform. After a brief respite when the government managed to block a Labour Party plan to allow 16- and 17-year-olds to be able to vote in the referendum, it was back to Brussels for a summit at which EU leaders broke little, if any new ground on migration or the U.K.’s reform plans. The most tangible decision they made was to adjourn their deliberations on those issues until the New Year. CRUNCH TIME As 2015 turned into 2016, Cameron was back on his Reform Tour. In Budapest, Viktor Orbán told the British PM that the 55,000 Hungarians working in the U.K. were not “parasites” and paid “more contributions and taxes than the benefits that they get.” Back in London, Cameron broke cover and gave his clearest indication yet that he wanted the U.K. to stay in the EU, telling the BBC: “I don’t think [an exit] is the right answer.” He also told the BBC’s Andrew Marr that the result of the referendum was not linked to his own political future, and he would remain in No. 10 Downing Street even if he lost the vote. Cabinet members, meanwhile, were warned not to make the case for Brexit in parliament, and not to speak out on the issue before an agreement on reform was secured. January 17 was a pivotal day in the process: the introduction of the phrase “emergency brake” to describe a mechanism to trigger a benefits ban if a country was overwhelmed by migrants. Those two words would prove contentious to the end. By this point the pressure was building. Tusk addressed the European Parliament in Strasbourg, saying: “The result of the referendum is more unpredictable than ever before. Time is of the essence here, and this is why I will work hard to strike a deal in February. It will not be easy but it is still possible.” On January 29, Cameron was in Brussels for meetings with Tusk, Martin Schulz and Jean-Claude Juncker, plus a phone conversation with François Hollande. The meeting with Juncker — who Cameron tried to keep from becoming Commission president — was described as “difficult but constructive.” “I can’t be certain we’ll get there in February but I will work as hard as I can to deliver a good deal for the British people,” Cameron said. His job wasn’t made any easier by upping the ante on a benefits ban; tweaking the language so every EU migrant who arrived in Britain at any time over the next seven years would need to wait four years to receive government benefits. (In a classic negotiating move, Cameron would double-down on that proposal at the beginning of this summit, pushing to extend the possibility for imposing the ban for an additional six years.) “The prime minister will tell Tusk that the ‘brake’ proposal sketched out so far does not go far enough and will need to be significantly strengthened if it is to be as powerful as the prime minister’s four-year proposal,” a senior U.K. government source said. That request was made at a dinner between Tusk and Cameron on January 31. Two days later, the first of many drafts of the deal by Tusk and his team was unveiled. “It is a dismal failure worse than we ever imagined,” Britain’s biggest-selling tabloid, the Sun, said of the Tusk draft. “Brussels, not for the first time, has treated us with contempt and given us the square root of diddly-squat.” It wasn’t a view shared by U.S. President Barack Obama, who called Cameron to voice his support for keeping Britain in the EU. The European Parliament was all giddy on February 4 when Cameron finally accepted a long-standing invitation to address MEPs. However, he had no intention of being hijacked by the Euroskeptics in the chamber and agreed only to speak with the group leaders, on February 16. The joy was short-lived. Cameron later said that “time constraints” — read “I don’t want to be in the same room as Marine Le Pen and Nigel Farage” — meant he couldn’t speak with group leaders, just Schulz and selected others. Even with the troublemakers out of the way, it wasn’t all plain sailing for Cameron in the Parliament as Schulz said he could not guarantee the assembly would give its blessing to the welfare reform proposal. Even as this summit ended, Schulz was talking of Parliament’s potential for tweaking the measures when they are implemented. The deal to keep Britain in the EU, it seems, is never quite done. _Hortense Goulard and Craig Winneker contributed to this article._
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