What the EU thinks of the different Tory leadership candidates

Jean-Claude Juncker, the president of the European Commission, declined to pick a favourite Tory leadership candidate on Tuesday, saying nobody had asked his opinion. He argued that it was not for the commission to interfere in the leadership selection process.

But with most of the candidates hoping to renegotiate some form of Brexit deal, what the EU thinks of them clearly matters. How would the different candidates go down in Brussels and what do people think of them?

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EU politicians and officials are well aware of Boris Johnson’s existence, and they don’t like what they see. Johnson certainly has name recognition on the continent, but not the good kind: he’s seen as a populist who lied his way through the EU referendum. Emmanuel Macron didn’t mention Johnson by name when he called Brexiteers “liars” last year, but there is no doubt that he had him, among others, in mind. EU commissioners such as Phil Hogan, who usually steer clear of criticising member states, previously mocked Johnson as being “out of the loop” in talks, and has also branded him one of the “three stooges” of Brexit alongside Nigel Farage and Jacob Rees-Mogg.

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Michael Gove is not as well-known abroad as Johnson, but he does have a profile in Brussels. Commissioner Hogan, who has sometimes served as Brussels’s attack dog on Brexit, in 2018 named him alongside Farage as one of the “high priests of Brexit” on whom the tide was going out. Macron may have also had him in mind as one of the aforementioned “liars”. Gove mostly steered clear of Brussels as environment secretary and has been sending junior ministers to attend talks in his stead.

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Jeremy Hunt’s allies have claimed the foreign secretary is a respected diplomat who is well-rated in Brussels and so could get a better Brexit deal. This isn’t really true, at all. Hunt was relatively unknown until he likened the union to a “Soviet prison”. This particularly upset Tusk, who was part of the anti-Soviet resistance in Poland in his days as a student leader – for a week after the confrontation, television screens in the European Council building played a video admonishing the foreign secretary as irresponsible, on a loop. He next came to prominence here by wrongly claiming Slovenia was a “Soviet vassal state”, cementing his reputation for historical ignorance.

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Dominic Raab was Brexit secretary and Michel Barnier’s direct counterpart, so not a complete stranger to Brussels. While the pair got on diplomatically enough at the time, many of his contributions on issues such as the Irish border were rejected out of hand by officials, who felt they were having to explain the same things to Raab as they had been doing with his predecessor David Davis in the previous months. But it was Raab’s decision to negotiate a deal and then resign to vote against it that left the greatest lasting memory of his tenure. He later said the UK had been “blackmailed and bullied” by the EU and was more recently accused of “fake, fraudulent and pure disinformation” over claims about an EU official.

Once you get past the bigger names, Sajid Javid, Andrea Leadsom and Matt Hancock, who don’t have much of a profile in Brussels, would to an extent be starting with a clean slate. Given the track record of their colleagues, however, it may not take long for them to blow their reputations.