EU leaders to UK: Brexit will come at a price

Jean-Claude Juncker warns against ‘secret negotiations in dark rooms.’

PARIS — European Commission President Jean-Claude Juncker warned Britain on Friday that the EU would be “intransigent” during Brexit talks, echoing tough remarks from the leaders of France and Germany.

“It must be clear that if Britain wants access to the internal market, all the rules and freedoms around the internal market must be totally respected,” Juncker said in Paris during a joint press conference with French Prime Minister Manuel Valls.

“On that point we must be intransigent. I see the maneuvers [by Britain to start informal Brexit talks] … You cannot have one foot in and one foot out. If we start to dismantle the internal market by agreeing to the demands of a country that wants to leave, then we will be bringing about the end of Europe,” he added.

Juncker’s comments, which Valls echoed during his speech, coincided with a ramping up of pressure on Britain from European leaders following Prime Minister Theresa May’s remarks that her country was headed for a “hard” Brexit. After German Chancellor Angela Merkel said Thursday that Britain would have to respect all EU principles to retain access to its markets, French President François Hollande spoke in even harsher terms of a “price” to pay for leaving the bloc.

“There needs to be a threat, there needs to be a risk, there needs to be a price,” Hollande said late Thursday in a speech given during a ceremony for the Jacques Delors Institute in Paris. “Britain has decided to do Brexit, even a ‘hard’ Brexit, as I understand it, well, then, we must go to the end of Britain’s desire to exit the European Union.”

Juncker added a warning against any attempt by Britain to try to circumvent the formal negotiating process.

“Britain, its government … are already explaining to industrial companies on the continent that relations must be as friendly as possible,” he said. But “it shouldn’t be that entire sections of European industry get involved in secret negotiations in dark rooms, with the blinds drawn, with envoys from the British government.”

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Christian Toto, over at his Hollywood in Toto site, was the first to declare Schwarzenegger “box office poison,” and he lays out the reasons why (RINO, Global Warming, etc). Since I can’t improve on that, I wanted to focus on the math and show my work.

Between 1982, straight through to 2003, Arnold Schwarzenegger was the king of the box office, the $20 million man, an unstoppable force and star who could open a movie on his name only. Granted, his star had waned a bit near the end, but his final round of films before becoming one of California’s worst governors, were hit and miss.

Not counting for 15 years of inflation, Terminator 3 (2003)  grossed $150 million domestic ($283M overseas).

End of Days (1999) earned a respectable $66  million domestic ($145M overseas), while The 6th Day (2000) and Collateral Damage (2002) sputtered out at $35 and $42 million, respectively.

Nevertheless, Schwarzenegger was still a big and bankable enough star that studios were willing to gamble huge budgets based only on his presence.

If Schwarzenegger thought he could ride out of the governorship and back into box office glory, that idea was quickly put down by four screaming flops in a row.

Last Stand (2013) died a twitching death with just $12 million domestic ($36M overseas).

Teaming up with fellow 80’s superstar Sylvester Stallone (who  is still bankable in hits like Creed) for Escape Plan (2013) failed to lift that prison break thriller above $25 million ($112M overseas).

Something called Sabotage (2014) grossed just $10 million ($7M overseas), and Schwarzenegger’s leap into the popular zombie genre with Maggie (2015) was a full-blown catastrophe grossing just $187,000 ($1.5M overseas). Public indifference ensured it never saw a release in more than 17 theaters.

Nevertheless, Arnold probably looks back at the years 2013 through 2015 as the good old days. After all, with $89 million domestic and $351 million overseas, at least his attempt to reboot his most famous franchise with Terminator: Genisys (2015) wasn’t a complete catastrophe. Oh, it lost money and under-performed bigly, so much so a planned trilogy was scrapped, but there was at least a spark of interest there.

Now let’s look at Arnold’s box office performance since President Trump’s 2016 election and Schwarzenegger’s embarrassing decision to become a girly-man Never Trumper.

A movie called Aftermath (2017) went straight to video.

A movie called Killing Gunther (2017) went straight to video.

Just stop and think about that… An Arnold Schwarzenegger movie went straight to video.

And then, all on his own, also in 2017, Schwarzenegger murdered NBC’s 14-year-old blockbuster Celebrity Apprentice franchise. This was a humiliation that deserved more attention at the time.

Schwarzenegger took over hosting duties from Trump, who turned the show into a mega-hit over 14 seasons. What’s more, during Trump’s 14th and final season, he attracted a viewership that ranged from 7.6 to 6.1 million viewers, which was an increase over the previous season. And then Schwarzenegger stumbled in, drove the ratings into the dirt with 4.8 to 3.5 measly viewers, and cancellation.

But Arnie always has Terminator, right? He can always go back to his classic franchise, right?

Not anymore.

Even with the return of co-star Linda Hamilton and producer/creator James Cameron, Terminator: Dark Fate opened two weeks ago and crashed upon take-off with a catastrophic $29 million opening. Over the last 11 days, Dark Fate still hasn’t crossed $50 million domestic and $200 million worldwide.

Arnold’s final grip on box office glory, his Terminator franchise and this $250 million (production plus promotion) boondoggle, is not only a box office humiliation, it killed a 35-year-old franchise.

Schwarzenegger still has a sequel to Twins in the works, a sequel to Conan, but let’s see how far those go now with the failure of Dark Fate.

I mean, if Arnold can’t even open a Terminator movie… 

Follow John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC. Follow his Facebook Page here.

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The most important free trade agreement you’ve never heard of

The Trade in Services Agreement is being worked out largely without political pushback.

Nearly two dozen countries have spent the last three years wrangling over a trade deal that will set the rules governing trade in services for much of the world for decades to come.

Yet you’ve likely never heard of it.

Other mammoth trade deals have triggered demonstrations across the EU and the U.S. while the so-called Trade in Services Agreement’s technicalities are being worked out largely without political pushback. In fact, it seems to have made it to the homestretch. 

The 18th round of TiSA negotiations concluded June 3, the next round begins Friday, and negotiators and national ministers appear to be pushing hard for the deal to be concluded by the end of the year. In October, a new market access offer will be presented by the negotiating countries for discussions. In November, parties meet again in Geneva and then again in December, “hopefully to conclude the agreement,” a Commission source said.

As more evidence of the deal’s potential scope, consider that the United States moved to keep China out of the deal just as it did with the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the free trade agreement between Washington and 11 other Pacific Rim countries. The EU wanted to include China. Now, if Beijing is allowed to join after negotiations conclude, it would have to adopt the rules set out by TiSA without getting any say.

But even when whistleblower platform WikiLeaks exposed draft copies of some of the proposed chapters of the deal late last month, the documents barely made a splash.

The only real frustration over the deal appears to be inside the rooms where negotiators have dithered over details about access to the U.S. maritime sector, European Union data privacy rules and e-commerce.

“Most trade deals include a chapter on services. But a negotiation such as TTIP is also expected to address where regulatory differences are unnecessary barriers to trade in areas such as  agricultural products and geographical indicators,” said Joshua Meltzer, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institute, referring to major sticking points in the Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership talks between the U.S. and EU.

TiSA deals with barriers to services trade such as the conditions by which lawyers from Norway might be able to practice in the United States or German engineers might gain easier visa access to Mexico.

“People simply don’t get excited about such issues, and the long-term consequences of such a deal are much harder to grasp,” Meltzer added.

Among the few groups that have voiced their worries is the European Consumer Organization (BEUC).

“We are concerned that TiSA will restrict the ability of the EU and its member states to maintain their right to regulate in the future,” spokesman Johannes Kleis said.

Some of TiSA’s negotiating parties propose that measures authorizing the supply of a service be based on “objective” and “transparent” criteria, potentially opening up the EU to disputes from other members of the pact that argue a regulation doesn’t meet the objective standard, the BEUC warns.

“Let’s say the EU plans to pass legislation for a certain service to have to respect higher consumer protection standards and that such legislation affected trade with a TiSA partner,” Kleis said. “This trade partner could urge the EU to reduce its ambition, saying the measure would not be necessary.”

TiSA also means deciding how a platform such as Amazon, as well as any other e-commerce, can treat data from a purchase in Europe or in Australia. At the moment the issue of data flows is a sticking point in the TiSA negotiations, with a rift between the U.S. and the EU. The U.S. favors a free flow of data across negotiating countries, while the EU was willing to concede less on the data front.

According to negotiators who took part in the 18th round, the EU is waiting for approval of the EU-U.S. “privacy shield,” an agreement that would require companies to transfer data across the Atlantic in a way that complies with EU privacy protections before moving forward. That is set to happen next week. If the deal is signed — as the European Commission has announced is likely multiple times over the past weeks — the negotiations on data flows on hold in TiSA might unlock or be resolved during coming rounds of talks.

That’s a bad thing from some viewpoints.

“If such an agreement were to be reached it would be extremely difficult to be reversed and that worries us,” said Myriam Vander Stichele of SOMO, the Centre for Research on Multinational Corporations, an NGO.

The European Commission, however, has given assurances that it is committed to protecting public services and that any decision to deregulate or privatize them is entirely up to national or local governments.

“The EU has never made commitments regarding publicly funded health services or insurance portability in any of its free trade agreements and does not intend to do so in the future,” TiSA included, the Commission said in a statement.

Setting rules for decades

Once TiSA takes effect, countries representing 70 percent of the world’s services trade will have a common set of rules governing those services, giving them hugely powerful leverage on countries outside of the pact.

“It’s nearly certain that those countries outside of TiSA will want access to the biggest common service market on the planet,” an official from one of the negotiating nations told POLITICO during the last round of negotiations in Geneva. That includes China.

But TiSA’s ultimate aim is even more ambitious. “Once the agreement comes into force we are hoping to integrate it into the World Trade Organization, in other words, have its rules accepted by all 162 WTO members and become the benchmark for global trade in services,” one European Commission source told POLITICO.

Over the past 20 years, trade agreements have shifted from what is known as a multilateral approach including all WTO countries to a plurilateral one involving a subset of their number. The shift was the response of very slow progress in multilateral trade deals given that all countries have a de facto veto power, and progress on services has stalled for the last two decades.

“It has been more than 20 years since the conclusion of a major trade agreement on services has been made,” said Mark Wu, an assistant professor at Harvard Law School who specializes in international trade law.

Trade in services accounts for a fifth of global trade, a number that is projected to increase steadily over the next decades as developing countries move from manufacturing and industrial-based economies to more service-based economies.

“If we get these negotiations right, TiSA is an opportunity for Europe to consolidate its position as a world leader in services trade,” said Viviane Reding, a Christian Democrat MEP and the European Parliament’s rapporteur on the pact. “We need to be standard-makers today, not to be standard takers tomorrow.”

International service exports were valued at about $5 trillion, a nearly 5 percent increase from a previous year, according to World Trade Organization data from 2014, the most recent available. Total global exports for 2014, including goods, were valued at $24 trillion, up by 1.2 percent from the previous year. Today, nearly 80 percent of America’s gross domestic product and 75 percent of the EU’s GDP is made up by the service sector.

The elephant outside the room

Understanding TiSA means looking at who is sitting around the negotiating table as well as those who are not. Beijing applied to be part of the negotiations when they began three years ago, but the U.S. blocked its application, much to the annoyance of other negotiating partners, the EU included.

“China is a heavyweight. If it was included in the negotiating process, the U.S. would have to negotiate taking into account very different positions from its own,” a negotiator in Geneva told POLITICO, speaking on the condition of anonymity. “The U.S. wants to decide the rules and then have every other country that wants to join TiSA simply follow them.”

A senior representative of the U.S. private sector during a visit to Brussels confirmed that sentiment to POLITICO.

There are multiple potential points of disagreement between the U.S. and China. One of the most difficult is data flows. The United States has had some difficulty settling the issue with the EU. If it were to negotiate with China — a country where data is highly controlled by the central government — the differences would be enormous.

The ingredients are all there to make 21 Bridges a memorable and exciting throwback to the glorious eighties, to a time when big stars drove high-concept action movies to box office gold. Unfortunately, these ingredients are undercooked.

Chadwick Boseman is back as an Avenger, only this time he’s an avenger in blue, a New York City detective with nine justified killings on his record in just ten years. He’s a cop famous among his own for killing cop killers. It’s in his DNA. You see, his father was a cop, a hero who, just before he died, managed to take down two of the three men responsible for beating him to death.

Things start promisingly enough. Two hired guns, two low-level criminals (Stephen James and Taylor Kitsch), enter a restaurant to rip off a drug dealer. Things immediately get complicated when the gunmen discover this is no low-level street dealer. They’re faced with 300 kilos of uncut cocaine and the realization they are now in way over their heads.

With that desperate and sweaty realization comes another — the fact that they will now have to hide forever. That’s going to take planning and money. But first they have to get out of this restaurant, and between them and a getaway are more than a half-dozen cops.

With frightening and realistic efficiency, the cops go down and the gunmen hit the streets looking to turn their drugs into enough gold to vanish.

Captain McKenna (J.K. Simmons) wants Andre Davis (Boseman) in charge of this hunt, and he doesn’t shy away or even hide his reasoning behind euphemisms or winks. McKenna wants these cop killers hunted and killed, wants their heads on a stick to save the families from endless trials and decades of parole hearings.

Davis is non-committal (a problem I’ll address in a bit), but now it’s time to deliver on the concept. The only way to ensure the cop killers can’t escape is to shut down the island of Manhattan. That means closing all 21 bridges, the train stations, the airports, and the waterways.  The mayor agrees. A shelter in place is put into effect. Davis has five hours until the city needs to be brought back to life. The clock is ticking.

Davis is partnered with Frankie Burns (Sienna Miller), a narcotics detective, and off we go…

The problem is not so much Brian Kirk’s direction. The opening shootout and an exciting foot chase that ends on the subway that comes later, are not only nicely staged, there’s none of this heightened reality that plagues so many action scenes these days. This is an action movie grounded in real life, a movie that respects the concept of gravity; and I don’t know about you, but I’m ready for more of that.

The problem is a heavy-handed and insanely predictable screenplay that lacks tension, intelligence, and nuance.

Davis is our hero. He should be at least one step ahead of the audience in unraveling everyone’s agenda. He’s not. The screenplay stubbornly pretends its mystery is a real mystery, that its plot actually twists, when it doesn’t. And this makes Davis look idiotic because he’s the only one oblivious to the obvious.

To be fair, maybe the idea is to let us in on the truth as a means to increase the suspense that comes with the audience being aware of a danger the hero doesn’t see. A variation of Hitchcock’s bomb under the bed. If that’s the goal, it’s a total misfire.

The biggest problem, though, is the character of Andre Davis, who makes no sense. And what a waste of a fine actor with charisma to burn like Boseman. Davis has killed nine people in ten years, but he’s still presented to us as a righteous cop, an honest cop who always does the right thing. What a dull choice, what a terrible decision. If ever a movie called for an anti-hero, a scuffed up, morally compromised cop, a Popeye Doyle, a Nick Conklin, this is it.

And it just makes no sense that an honest cop could commit nine justified killings throughout an entire career, much less ten years. I just can’t understand why they didn’t dirty Davis up a little, why they didn’t compromise him. Instead, he’s a saint. He even cares for his senile mother. This makes him boring, one-dimensional and predictable when he should crackle, when he should have us wondering what the hell he’ll do next, how far he’ll go, or if there’s a point where his blind loyalty can be made to see by a sense of humanity.

Is it possible this was in the original script but removed for woke reasons, because Boseman is black and Twitter will get mad if a black star plays a dirty cop?

There’s no way to now. I wouldn’t be surprised. At the same time, though, to the movie’s credit, despite the subject matter, there’s nothing racial. Other than a funny line about making sure your diction is correct when you call me a “trigger,” race never comes up, and in this day and age, that’s a pleasant surprise.

Also wasted is the great Keith David who, as always, makes a large impression just by being there … and then he inexplicably disappears without a trace. This character is presented to us as a father figure to Davis, the Obi Wan Kenobi who will lead our hero into the light. Instead, poof, he’s gone.

An unfortunate waste of everyone’s time.

Follow John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC. Follow his Facebook Page here.

Moscovici has designs on European Commission presidency

French socialist has expressed interest in top job in Brussels as well as mooted eurozone finance minister post.

European Commissioner Pierre Moscovici is eyeing its presidency when Jean-Claude Juncker’s term expires in 2019.

“The candidacy for the post of president of the Commission could interest me,” Moscovici told Germany’s Welt am Sonntag in an interview.

The socialist French politician, who oversees the economic and finance portfolio at the Commission, added that after weak election results in many EU member states for the left, “European social democracy is in a crisis” and needs to rebuild ahead of European elections in two years.

Moscovici told POLITICO’s EU Confidential podcast last month that he backs calls for a European finance minister and would be “be honored, pleased, etc. to be in that function.”

In an interview published earlier this month, Harriet screenwriter Gregory Allen Howard said a film studio executive once suggested that actress Julia Roberts be cast to play the lead roll of iconic abolitionist Harriet Tubman.

“Harriet, which was set up at Disney 26 years ago, was my first assignment. When I got in the business, I wanted to tell these historical stories by turning them into entertainment. I didn’t want to give history lessons,” Howard explained when asked to give a short history of how the film came together.

“I wanted to turn Harriet Tubman’s life, which I’d studied in college, into an action-adventure movie. The climate in Hollywood, however, was very different back then. I was told how one studio head said in a meeting, ‘This script is fantastic. Let’s get Julia Roberts to play Harriet Tubman.’”

The writer behind hit films like Remember the Titans and Ali continued: “When someone pointed out that Roberts couldn’t be Harriet, the executive responded, ‘It was so long ago. No one is going to know the difference.’”

Directed by Kasi Lemmons, Harriet stars British actress Cynthia Erivo as Harriet Tubman, who was born a slave, escaped and became the leader of an anti-slavery movement and conductor of what later became known as the Underground Railroad.

The film debuted over the weekend and beat expectation, grossing $12 million from 2,059 theaters. The film currently boasts a 97 audience rating on Rotten Tomatoes.

In his review (read it here) of Harriet, Breitbart’s John Nolte notes: “Throughout its 125 minute runtime, Harriet is engaging, suspenseful, and rousing, and it still would have been all those things without Cynthia Erivo in the title role. Without her, though, Harriet would have also felt more like a television movie than something worthy of a theatrical release.”

Jerome Hudson is Breitbart News Entertainment Editor and author of the bestselling book 50 Things They Don’t Want You to Know. Order your copy today. Follow Jerome Hudson on Twitter @jeromeehudson.

Commission sides with artists over tech giants in radical reforms

Juncker ‘is completely out of touch with how the internet works,’ said MEP Julia Reda.

STRASBOURG — The European Commission has a daring new plan to unify the Continent’s fragmented broadcasting market and force tech giants to pay musicians, publishers, and performers more for showcasing their creative work.

The once-in-a-generation reform published Wednesday would allow Europeans the option to buy any program that any broadcaster puts online. It would allow artists to negotiate with companies like YouTube or Soundcloud for a greater cut of their profits. And it would bail out publishers by allowing them to press news aggregators such as Google News for compensation.

“Artists and creators are our crown jewels,” President Jean-Claude Juncker said in his State of Union address here. “The creation of content is not a hobby, it is a profession.”

The expansive overhaul of copyright rules, which were last updated in 2001, is considered the most controversial ingredient of the Commission’s plan to create a single market for digital services. The executive branch would give consumers greater access to broadcasters’ online content, so citizens living in Latvia could buy access to Sky’s British broadcast of the English Premier League soccer matches, instead of hoping a Latvian broadcaster bought the rights to show the games.

The proposal is merely the end of the first round in the copyright fight: Now that the reforms have been ushered through the Commission, they will go to Parliament where MEPs will push their national interests.

And the critics were quick to react.

“He is completely out of touch with how the internet works. All this will do is stifle freedom of expression online,” said German MEP Julia Reda, who wrote a report on copyright. “This will hurt European publishers.”

Siada El-Ramly of consultancy EDiMA, which represents internet platforms, was even more pointed: “We’re disappointed on the proposal and it lacks ambition in terms of meeting the needs of the digital age. It focuses on the effective lobbying done by the publishing and music sector.”

The potential cost of lowering digital borders has sent shock waves through the media and entertainment industry. Some fear that by breaking down broadcasting barriers, consumers could shop around Europe for the lowest-priced entertainment, wreaking havoc on long-held business models: Content is typically cheaper in poorer nations.

“We’re concerned about the burden on innovation,” said James Waterworth, vice president of the Computer and Communications Industry Association.

The Commission would also force companies like Google and video-streaming service Vimeo to disclose commercially sensitive details of the contracts they sign with large record labels and recording studios to show their content on platforms. Artists would then, in theory, have more information to strike better deals for their work, and resort to a new dispute-resolution mechanism.

Although subscription-based music services attract fewer users than ad-supported platforms such as YouTube, companies like Spotify pay artists far more to supply their work online. The Commission has described the disparity between two as the “value gap.”

Google has said its “Content ID” system prevents copyrighted material from being illegally uploaded by users. However, critics, including Reda, said the cost of these recognition technologies is prohibitive for startups.

“It is therefore necessary to guarantee that authors and rightsholders receive a fair share of the value that is generated by the use of their works and other subject-matters,” the Commission said in its proposal.

The Commission’s squeeze on internet platforms doesn’t stop there.

The executive arm will also introduce a so-called neighboring right. It would allow news publishers to seek payment from aggregators like Google and Reddit who link to their content. The measure, dubbed a “link tax,” would give journalism the same legal protection that other media sectors already have when their work is shared without permission.

“I want journalists, publishers, authors to be paid fairly for their work, whether it is made in studios or living rooms, whether it is disseminated offline or online, whether it is published via a copying machine or hyperlinked on the web,” Juncker said.

Although it doesn’t require news aggregators to pay more, it will give publishers more leverage and a stronger incentive to negotiate as a bloc.

The Commission also will give scientific researchers the right to process large quantities of data. Some researchers have been reluctant to deploy text and data mining because of fears over copyright violations.

Laurens Cerulus and Joanna Plucinska contributed.

A Trump campaign video, which featured music from Queen and was shared by President Donald Trump to his twitter account last week, has been taken down after the band’s publisher issued a complaint.

The clip used in the tweet, which contained a footage of President Trump speaking to supporters at rallies, also included Queen’s hit song “We Will Rock You.”

When attempting to view the clip from President Trump’s feed, a message now appears that states, “This media has been disabled in response to a report by the copyright owner.”

After the release of the clip, a representative for the group told Buzzfeed the band had “already entered into a process to call for non use of Queen song copyrights by the Trump campaign. This is ongoing.”

Buzzfeed also stated the representaive for the band told them the Trump campaign was not authorized to use the song.

Last week, the estate of Prince took aim at President Trump after Prince’s classic song “Purple Rain” was played at his rally in Minneapolis, the home of the pop rock legend.

“President Trump played Prince’s ‘Purple Rain’ tonight at a campaign event in Minneapolis despite confirming a year ago that the campaign would not use Prince’s music,” Prince’s estate said. “The Prince Estate will never give permission to President Trump to use Prince’s songs.”

Follow Kyle on Twitter @RealKyleMorris and Facebook.

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Team Theresa gets frosty European reception

EU politicians react with shock and name-calling to the provocative new British power structure.

Shock, anxiety and name-calling aren’t typical reactions to the incoming government of a respected world power, but they describe a good part of Europe’s welcome for British Prime Minister Theresa May’s new cabinet — and especially her surprise pick for foreign secretary, Boris Johnson.

While many politicians offered polite words of congratulation for May, they weren’t shy about taking aim at others in her inner circle, mainly Euroskeptic politicians who drove the Brexit effort. That Johnson — a man who recently referred to Turkey’s president as a “wankerer” — would be Britain’s chief emissary to the world drew much of the fire.

French Foreign Minister Jean-Marc Ayrault, in a radio interview Thursday morning, called Johnson a liar who misled British voters and who would “have his back against the wall” as the U.K. tried to negotiate its future relationship with Europe. Later Thursday, in a university speech, German Foreign Minister Frank-Walter Steinmeier referred to Johnson as one of several “irresponsible” politicians who “lured the country into a Brexit.”

Both men, representing Europe’s biggest powers, will sit across the negotiating table from Johnson in just a few days, when foreign ministers meet in Brussels for what will be the Tory Brexit champion’s EU debut.

Other European politicians expressed similar alarm at the news.

“When I saw Johnson’s appointment on my phone,” said Philippe Juvin, a French MEP from the center-right European People’s Party, “I didn’t know whether it was British humor or reality.”

Even before Johnson was announced, he was the target of criticism from European Commission First Vice President Frans Timmermans, who made a clear but indirect reference to Johnson in a Facebook post. Timmermans criticized Brexit “campaigners” who compared the EU to Nazi Germany, as Johnson had done in a newspaper interview in May. “Why did you find it necessary to bring the Nazis into this campaign?” Timmermans asked.

There was also criticism from some about the larger makeup of May’s cabinet, which included prominent Euroskeptic David Davis in a new role as “secretary of state for exiting the EU,” a title that amounts to a diplomatic provocation of sorts; and Liam Fox as secretary of state for international trade. Both men will face the daunting task of trying to negotiate new trade and economic relationships with countries across Europe and around the world.

“It is interesting to see how many Brexiteers are in key positions,” said Tomas Prouza, the Czech European affairs minister. “I assume it is a warning for us that the negotiations will be tough and long.”

‘Awkward’

In Brussels, the main heads of the EU institutions gave cordial but terse congratulations to May, and largely withheld comment about her cabinet picks.

But European Parliament President Martin Schulz was not shy about criticizing the new British government, telling German newspaper Süddeutsche Zeitung on Thursday that the composition of the cabinet “shows that the focus is less on the future of the country but more about satisfying the internal cohesion of the Tory party.”

Schulz said the “United Kingdom has to break this dangerously vicious cycle which has direct impacts on the rest of Europe.”

Gianni Pittella, leader of the Parliament’s Socialist bloc, said: “Apart from the fact that the U.K has elected a woman, the entire government is orientated on a pro-Brexit line, and a line that contradicts what May stood for before.”

But EU diplomats and experts reserved their strongest criticism for Johnson, saying that as the architect of the Brexit campaign and purveyor of such blunt public statements as comparing Hillary Clinton to “a sadistic nurse in a mental hospital,” he will have a hard time being taken seriously.

“It will be awkward, because he’s not diplomatic and the diplomats are upset about Brexit,” a senior EU diplomat said. “For the political situation in the U.K. it was logical to choose Boris. Luckily it’s the heads of states who will do the heavy lifting in the negotiations.”

Another senior EU diplomat who will be at Johnson’s first Foreign Affairs Council meeting in Brussels on Monday said: “It will be a challenge, there will be many ministers who will question his credentials.”

Others were a little less harsh in their criticism of Johnson, and paid tribute to May for having formed a government earlier than expected and created the new role for Davis.

“I think there will be a very limited role for Boris Johnson in the EU,” said Prouza. “The Brexit negotiation will be undoubtedly run directly out of Number 10 with Mr. Davis the point man for the negotiations. So I expect Mr. Johnson to focus more on topics outside the EU.”

Gallic groan

Ayrault wasn’t alone in France’s ruling Socialist elite in greeting the appointment of Johnson with scorn.

Known as a consummate French-basher, described by Reuters France as “king of the gaffe,” the former London mayor has repeatedly irritated Parisian society with his quips at their expense, notably when he compared the presidency of François Hollande to a hold-up of the rich by “sans culottes” — French commoners who led the 1789 Revolution.

Elisabeth Guigou, the Socialist chief of the National Assembly’s committee on foreign affairs, recently told POLITICO that Johnson was a man who “surfed on the wave” of anti-EU sentiment in order to boost his own career, only to shy away from the responsibility of dealing with Brexit by saying there was no need to quickly make official Britain’s divorce with the EU.

“This behavior does not surprise me from him at all,” said Guigou.

A consolation for French leaders is that, as foreign secretary, Johnson will not be directly responsible for negotiating the terms of Britain’s withdrawal from the EU.

“Boris Johnson will probably not have a major influence on future negotiations with the European Union,” wrote Le Figaro, a right-leaning daily.

And at least one European political veteran said Johnson would be a welcome addition to the EU diplomatic scene:

“I think it will bring color to Europe,” said Elmar Brok, a German MEP who chairs the European Parliament’s Foreign Affairs Committee.

Meanwhile, another key U.K. ally was keeping a calmer head about the appointment of Johnson.

Johnson spoke Thursday with his American counterpart, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, who will also be in Brussels next week to meet with EU foreign ministers. According to a U.S. State Department readout of the conversation, Kerry congratulated Johnson and told him he hoped for a “sensible and measured approach” to Brexit.

Manchester City came from behind to beat Real Madrid on their own turf after some serious tactical tweaks from their manager

Pep Guardiola put on a tactical “masterclass” in Manchester City’s 2-1 win at Real Madrid on Wednesday night, according to former City defender Micah Richards.

City came from behind at Santiago Bernabeu to take a huge step towards the last eight of the Champions League.

Isco capitalised on some slack defending to put Madrid ahead but a Gabriel Jesus header and a penalty from Kevin De Bruyne left the away side in the driver’s seat ahead of the second leg.

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Guardiola started without the likes of Sergio Aguero, Fernandinho and Raheem Sterling and opted for an unusual shape to his team, but City looked comfortable throughout the match.

“This was a masterclass,” Richards told BBC Radio 5 Live. So many times, people question Pep – to not start David Silva, Sterling, Aguero, Fernandinho – he deserves massive credit.

“Tonight, he showed that if he’s not the best [coaches] in the world, he is one of the top three.”

City edged the possession and had more shots and shots on target than Madrid, and were buoyed late on by a red card for Madrid captain Sergio Ramos.

Sterling returned from injury from the bench, while Fernandinho was forced on after Aymeric Laporte limped from the pitch in tears – the only cloud left hanging over an excellent night for Guardiola’s side.

England forward Sterling has been linked with a move to the Bernabeu, though Guardiola has said he has no questions over his commitment to the City cause – and Richards seems to agree.

“Raheem Sterling has not been in the greatest form of late,” he admitted.

“But he can change games with the way he runs at defenders. You can see why Real Madrid are interested in him – he walks into that side. But City have got better players than them.

“After all that happened with UEFA, this is a different City. They are working harder and working together.

“Everyone throws stones at you when you play for City, so to have that unity, it’s them against the world. They are really fighting for each other.”

City’s next fixture sees them take on Aston Villa in the Carabao Cup final at Wembley on Sunday.

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