PM accuses EU of mismanagement following summit in which France and Italy said to demand slight adjustment to UK rebate
The prime minister rounded aggressively on the EU, accusing it of mismanagement and disorganisation after what he portrayed as a naked French-led attempt to reduce the rebate Britain receives on the EU budget.
Following an argument in the early hours of Friday on the fringes of a two-day EU summit in which France and Italy were said to demand a slight adjustment to the British rebate agreed in February, David Cameron spent much of his post-summit press conference denouncing how the EU is run.
"In this town you need to be ready for an ambush at any time," he said of Brussels. "Lock and load and have one up the spout to be ready … It is immensely frustrating sometimes the way this organisation works."
While Cameron talked up the challenge to the British rebate, speaking of a French-led "ambush at one o'clock in the morning," other key participants, speaking privately, dismissed the row as a storm in a teacup. "It was a kind of false problem," said one. "It took 10 minutes at the end of [the summit]. I'm really not interested."
Germany's Der Spiegel magazine accused Cameron of looking for trouble where there was none. "The British are nothing if not predictable," it said.
British officials insisted the issue was real and that the French and Italians had raised technical questions about the rebate agreed when EU leaders finalised the new seven-year budget in February.
While Cameron emphasised that he had secured the rebate as "inviolable", it appeared that his campaign to re-open the EU treaties and to renegotiate the terms of Britain's EU membership before a referendum in 2017 were set back.
Key summit participants said that the mood of the summit was one of semi-complacency with the heat off in the euro crisis, meaning that the leaders of the eurozone were a lot less keen to push ahead with pooling sovereign powers over economic and fiscal policy and less interested in reopening the treaty.
While the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, argued for a greater degree of economic policy co-ordination in the eurozone on Friday, the majority of other leaders were guarded, stressing their reluctance to surrender sovereignty over policymaking, senior sources said.
Cameron, by contrast, urged the eurozone to take a big leap towards greater integration. Paradoxically, diplomats and officials pointed out, Britain, in its semi-detached position on the EU, is becoming the strongest advocate of greater Eurozone unification.
Officials said that with the single currency no longer under an "existential threat", the enthusiasm among governments for much closer eurozone rules was waning.