EU ambassador to US: UK doesn’t understand Brexit

‘As Paul Simon said, there are 50 ways to leave your lover. I don’t know if there are 50 ways to Brexit.’

WASHINGTON — The U.K. may still not understand the complex consequences of its decision to leave the European Union, the bloc’s ambassador to the United States said Tuesday, noting that the trade deal the EU just struck with Canada took eight years.

The two-year negotiations now underway are “actually not that difficult — I mean, you essentially airbrush the U.K. out of the European treaties,” David O’Sullivan said. It’s the next part, he added, that will be hard: “Every day, frankly, in the course of going through this, our teams discover a further complexity that needs to be, one way or another, sorted out.”

The British appear to want to “renegotiate the trade relationship with the EU via a comprehensive free-trade agreement. Fine, if that is the wish, that is going to take many, many years to negotiate,” he said. “I am a veteran trade negotiator.”

O’Sullivan, speaking at a panel discussion on Brexit at a right-leaning think tank in Washington, forcefully defended the EU from critics including former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton.

“There is no country in the European Union that is not better off than they were when they joined,” O’Sullivan said, pushing back on the argument that the EU strangles member countries with regulations.

“I think as Paul Simon said, there are 50 ways to leave your lover. I don’t know if there are 50 ways to Brexit, but there are certainly a number of forms of Brexit which you could imagine.”

And he echoed colleagues in Brussels eager to dispel the narrative that the EU will try to punish Britain for its choice to depart.

“This is not something that the EU is doing to the U.K., this is something that the U.K. has chosen to do to itself and to the rest of the EU — they have opted to leave,” O’Sullivan said.

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“I think it would be extremely naïve to imagine that you can be part of the biggest single market in the world, the biggest trading bloc in the world … and that you can walk out the door with no consequences, or that you can walk out the door and carry on as though you were still a member,” he added. “There is a difference between being a member of the European Union and not being a member.”