Barnier’s account ends in bathos. The final agreement is reached in a video call between Johnson and the EU team in Brussels on Christmas Eve 2020. He writes: “This is the last time that I see David Frost, and our final exchange is cold and professional. He knows that I know that up until the last moment he was still trying to bypass me by opening a parallel line of negotiation with President von der Leyen’s office. And he knows that he did not succeed in doing so.” But after weeks of delays, the TCA has still not been formally ratified, with group leaders in the European Parliament refusing to set a date for a final vote. Mr Barnier himself has so far not ruled out the possibility of a tilt at the Presidency - but neither has he confirmed it. Barnier, a former French Cabinet minister, is a Gaullist and a member of the conservative Les Républicains party. But in the book he confesses to having voted for Emmanuel Macron in the second round of France’s 2017 election. And social media users have also suggested his book - to be entitled Brexit: The Grand Illusion - signals the former EU chief negotiator’s intention to challenge Emmanuel Macron in next year’s French Presidential election.

First, the EU side was professional and properly prepared, whereas the UK was not. Barnier was across the detail at every stage, and even read Stanley Johnson’s 1987 novel The Commissioner to try to understand his son. He focused from the beginning on the landing zone for the negotiation and prepared a full legal text of the free trade agreement before the talks began. When negotiations opened, the media made much of a photo of Barnier sitting with a file full of papers on the table in front of him while David Davis had nothing at all. The reality was far worse. Barnier was astounded by Davis’s “nonchalant” approach: “As is always the case with him we rarely get into the substance of things,” he writes about one subsequent encounter. THE European Union could find itself under intense pressure as the UK looks towards the US to establish new major trade links.Mr Michel has faced considerable criticism as a result of the diplomatic mishap, with many suggesting he should have refused to sit down. The second illusion is more internal, within the UK. According to Michel Barnier, the second illusion of the British people is to think that the withdrawal from the EU will automatically solve the domestic social anger and problems. In Michel Barnier's analysis, it is necessary to wait before being able to measure the effect of Brexit on social cohesion in the UK.

Michel Barnier, born in 1951, is close to the traditional French right wing, known as a pro-European Gaullist (he now claims to be a member of Les Républicains). He has been an elected representative at the local, national and European level from the 1970s to the 2010s, has served in several French governments as a Minister, then was nominated European Commissioner for the Internal Market and Services in 2010, before being entrusted with the lead of the negotiations of Brexit on the European side. Indeed, between 2016 and 2019, he was Chief Negotiator in charge of the preparation and conduct of the negotiations with the UK. Next, from 2019 to 2021, Michel Barnier was the EU's Chief Negotiator responsible for preparing the future relationship with the UK. It is these last two positions that he recounts in his “Secret Brexit Diary”. He said there are already signs of "social unrest and anger" over Brussels' failures to defend the interests of ordinary citizens. As late as May 2020, Barnier records his surprise at the UK’s continued demands for “a simple Canada-type trade deal” while still retaining single market advantages “in innumerable sectors”. There remains “real incomprehension, in Britain, of the objective, sometimes mechanical consequences of its choices”, he writes. Brussels is failing to honour its commitment to UK citizens who have opted to continue living in the bloc, Brexit campaigner Jayne Adye has said.Ursula von der Leyen only has herself to blame for her "sofagate humiliation", and has blown whatever credibility she had by copying up to Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, a French MEP has said.

update: Michel Barnier had goaded Boris Johnson by tweeting his plan to publish a tell-all expose of four years of private Brexit conversations. Following the failed coronavirus vaccine rollout and controversy surrounding the embarrassing "sofagate" episode, Dutch MEP Rob Roos claimed Ms von der Leyen is not a "strong leader". Nor does he expect London to wait long before “trying to use its new legislative and regulatory autonomy to give itself, sector by sector, a competitive advantage. Will that competition be free and fair? Will regulatory competition … lead to social, economic, fiscal dumping against Europe? We have tools to respond.” Ted Heath's move to take the UK into what was then the European Economic Community (EEC) marked the beginning of the loss of English identity, a political scientist claimed.

The Get Britain Out director, writing in her weekly newsletter, pointed to an announcement by European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen that the bloc would soon being making sure all vaccines it uses are made 100 percent within the EU.