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Invoking Falklands and common cause with Argentina, ‘Rajoy has burnt his boats with PM Cameron’

“Try charm” with Gibraltar and PM Cameron, The Times Roger Boyes suggests to Rajoy

Roger Boyes, Diplomatic Editor of The Times, has criticised the recent tactics by Spain and urges the conservative government to return to a more positive approach to the Gibraltar question. Likewise by invoking the Falklands and making common anti-British cause with Argentina the Spanish PM “has burnt his boats with British PM David Cameron”.

The piece suggests ‘try charm’ and don’t set siege to the people of Gibraltar. If Mariano Rajoy is serious about claims to the territory, he must abandon his silly populism.

“The conservative Mariano Rajoy should have been one of David Cameron’s most valuable allies in the European Union. Instead the Spanish premier’s cynical ratcheting up of the Gibraltar issue has exposed him as a populist of the worst kind,” says Boyes adding that the row is a smokescreen to hide corruption scandals in Madrid.

“By invoking the Falklands, by making common anti-British cause with Argentina, Mr Rajoy has burnt his boats with David Cameron,” says Boyes.

He recalls that the idea of “gunboat diplomacy” was launched by Palmerston with a Royal Navy siege of Piraeus in 1850 — in defence of a Gibraltarian merchant, Don Pacifico.

“There could be an intervention by the European Commission but it would be unrealistic to expect anything to stir in Brussels until the end of the summer holidays. If we are serious about Gibraltar though, and about its place in Europe, we should use this stand-off with Spain to come up with a few fresh ideas. The founding principle of the European Union was to banish war from the continent. More, we are still guided by the strong, though not infallible argument, that war does not break out between democracies. The Spanish Government is not the Argentine junta of the 1980s. It is a tried and tested democracy, our partner in the EU and Nato, institutions that should make muscle flexing redundant,” he says.

Arguing against putting conflicts in the EU “into the freezer, unresolved, in the hope that the mere passage of time will somehow present a solution” he urges more pragmatism and cites the case of Cyprus too.

“Britain,” he notes, “was able to get Spain to lift its de facto blockade of Gibraltar in 1986 as a condition for backing its Common Market membership. Today there is no leverage over Spain, just as we have little leverage in the Cyprus issue now that Nicosia is inside the EU.”

The only way to avoid Gibraltar becoming toxic for British-Spanish relations is to find a new mechanism for talking about the Rock, says Boyes.

“What we need is for local issues to be solved, or at least aired, at a local level — that is, between the Gibraltar government and the regional administration of Andalucia. Not every neighbourhood dispute has to land in Mr Rajoy’s in-tray. As for the political conversation between the British and Spanish governments, we can talk perhaps about tax transparency in Gibraltar — that was after all the leitmotif of our G8 presidency. It cannot be based however on any idea of shared sovereignty over the Rock. The Spanish Prime Minister has demonstrated plainly enough that he considers full Spanish sovereignty to be the only desirable goal, even though the Gibraltarians are overwhelmingly in favour of staying British.”

The rational Spanish strategy, he says, would be to set about persuading the Gibraltarians that Spanish rather than British citizenship would bring real advantages to their children.

“Not easy given the state of the Spanish (and Andalucian) economy, but why don’t you give it a go, Mr Rajoy? Try charm. There has got to be a better advertisement for modern Spain than laying siege to the people on the Rock.” @rogerboyes