THE GUARDIAN: The Germans and French were ready to accommodate Britain's difficulties but were not prepared to write them into a new treaty
"I have not and have no plans to attend any wife swapping parties," David Cameron said in Brussels shortly before he flew back to Britain, in one of the more startling statements by a British prime minister at an European summit.
His jovial remark stemmed from reports that a French official had said late on Thursday that Britain's attempts to secure concessions in negotiations about the euro were akin to a man going to a wife swapping party without his wife (it turned out that the actual French quote was fruitier).
There was some method to it, designed as it was to show that the prime minister is not alarmed by warnings from across the EU that he has marginalised Britain after vetoing a revision of the Lisbon treaty, paving the way for virtually every other EU member state to agree to a treaty outside the architecture of the EU to underpin tough new rules for the eurozone.
The French briefing illustrated that France had detected even before the summit had started that Cameron was isolated. Nicolas Sarkozy, the French president, drove this point home during nearly 10 hours of negotiations through Thursday night and into Friday morning. By 5am, when Sarkozy strode out of the summit room to declare that Britain had blocked a revision of the Lisbon treaty, France had taken a major step towards one of its long-standing strategic goals – the creation of a "two speed" Europe in which France and Germany surge ahead, leaving Britain to bring up the rear.
The reaction was swift and cutting. One Brussels veteran said: "I have always felt that the UK will just stumble out of the EU. This confirms that view. We are reaping the wind of 30 years of vitriolic UK press coverage." » | Nicholas Watt and Ian Traynor in Brussels | Friday, December 09, 2011
