Why won’t Angela Merkel take Boris Johnson’s phone calls?

It is the besetting vice of British media culture that we only notice what is happening abroad when it directly affects us. So we are surprised, for example, that Boris Johnson has been

rebuffed several times in the last week when he tried to speak directly to Emmanuel Macron and, especially, Angela Merkel about the impending threat of no-deal. Having made only limited

progress in his trade talks with the Commission, the Prime Minister understandably hopes to break the impasse by appealing to the two European leaders who pull the strings in Brussels. 

Yet both are grappling with existential crises of their own. The precarious situation in France has been extensively discussed in this column. Macron is embattled over his clampdown on

Islamism and his new security law, so he has picked a fight with the British over fishing rights: “All I want is a cake that’s worth its weight. Because I won’t give up my share of it

either.” In a country obsessed with its President’s prestige, Macron cannot be seen to back down — especially not to gunboat diplomacy.

Mrs Merkel doesn’t care about fish, but she does mind about German business becoming uncompetitive. The notorious “ratchet” — the proposed system of automatic punitive tariffs that would

kick in as soon as the EU decided that the UK had failed to raise the regulatory bar as high as its own — has “Made in Germany” written all over it. The EU has now conceded that the

agreement would be reciprocal and that some kind of arbitration might be invoked before the tariffs could be imposed, but it won’t budge on the basic principle. It is this straightjacket,

intended to deny the British any benefit from “taking back control”, that is the real stumbling block. The “level playing field” is an excuse for protectionism and a method of perpetuating

the EU’s legislative hegemony over the UK by other means.

Why, though, is the German Chancellor so inflexible? It is not as though her compatriots are as focused on the outcome of the talks in Brussels as the British. There is only one topic of

conversation in Germany right now: the return of the pandemic. “Coronavirus is out of control,” the Bavarian prime minister Marcus Söder declared. Deaths are soaring, the track and trace

system cannot cope and hospitals are close to capacity. Last night Mrs Merkel announced that the Federal Republic will this week go back into a hard form of lockdown. Even at Christmas,

families will have just a two-day window when they can socialise, under the strictest conditions. The land that exported its festive customs to the world has all but cancelled Christmas.

What has gone wrong? During the first wave of Covid, Germany was held up as a model of good practice. The success of its track and trace system, mass testing and social distancing was used

as a stick to beat the British authorities by the BBC and others who loathed Brexit. The title of a book by John Kampfner, Why the Germans Do It Better, summed up this view. Indeed, by

September the British Government was buying into this narrative by deciding to imitate the German Robert Koch Institute with its own National Institute for Health Protection, while Rishi

Sunak borrowed the German Kurzarbeit model of part-time jobs to replace the costlier furlough system. (At the time, I wrote about both here.) 

Yet while these initiatives made sense, when the second wave of Covid arrived, it hit Germany hard. Despite a “lockdown lite”, the graph of infections and deaths has continued to rise until

it is now alarming even those who previously prioritised the economy over health. Germany has a long way to go before its death toll matches the UK’s — the virus has still killed only about

a third as many there as in this country — but the fact that the previously hesitant provincial leaders all agreed to a full lockdown, despite the economic damage it will cause, shows how

worried they are. The Health Minister, Jens Spahn, is now demanding that the EU speed up its authorisation of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine, which is already being used in the UK. Though

developed in Germany, it cannot yet be used there to slow down the rising tide of Covid, now exceeding 30,000 new cases a day.

So far, Mrs Merkel has escaped blame, though she knows that the buck stops at her desk. Despite having been at the helm for nearly 15 years, she still lacks a successor. Unless the pandemic

can be brought back under control, and soon, her plan to stand down in good time for the election next autumn may have to be revised or even scrapped. She cannot allow her legacy to be a

country ravaged by a coronavirus she failed to control.

In this predicament, Angela Merkel is in no mood to throw a bone to Boris Johnson. He is, to put it mildly, not her kind of guy. She distrusts his manner, his motives and his modus operandi.

As for chemistry: the Prime Minister’s reputation vitiates. any attempt to strike up a rapport. An unnamed British negotiator tells The Times that Mrs Merkel’s refusal to take his phone

calls last week reflected “a Lutheran’s distaste for a libertine”. 

It’s not as if Germans in general are invariably averse to a little libertinism. Her predecessor as Chancellor, Gerhard Schröder, has had five wives — two more than Boris Johnson will have

had when he marries his fiancée Carrie Symonds. The late Willy Brandt, perhaps the most internationally admired of all postwar German leaders, lost power because his womanising made him

vulnerable to blackmail and he was forced to resign over a spy scandal. 

Yet where the Don Giovanni of Downing Street is concerned, the opera-loving Angela Merkel is implacable. It would cost her nothing to humour him, but she sees it as her duty to make an

example of the British. Her desire to shield the Single Market makes her no less of a protectionist than Donald Trump, but on her handling of Brexit she faces little or no opposition. It is

the same story as with David Cameron. As a pastor’s daughter she is a prisoner of the mythology of Luther, who preferred to plunge Europe into centuries of religious civil war rather than

compromise: “Here I stand. I can do no other.” The Lutheran and the libertine were never going to hit it off. Yet even Bismarck, the Iron Chancellor himself, famously remarked that politics

is “the art of the possible”. A post-Brexit free trade deal is eminently possible. Not only the UK, but Europe too will pay a heavy price for Angela Merkel’s intransigence.  

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