UK and EU can now dominate G7 – first ever EU ambassador to Britain hails new 'special relationship'

The European Union's first ever ambassador to Britain has “previous” with our Prime Minister. Thirty years ago Joao Vale de Almeida was a spokesman for the European Commission, dealing with a daily interrogation from The Telegraph's Brussels correspondent, Boris Johnson.

When I ask him what it was like, Mr Vale de Almeida leans on his decades of working in Brussels to offer a, well, diplomatic answer.

He says: "We were together almost every day in the press room... we were actually friends at the time and we had a lively relationship."

Mr Vale de Almeida remembers one report for The Telegraph in particular: "At that time we had a problem in our main building – the Berlaymont building – because we found asbestos there and we were in the process of moving," he says.

"One of the stories of that time that I remember was the whole process of leaving, evacuating. Of course, Boris Johnson, journalist at the time, was always very creative about all that. We had good exchanges about that."

No wonder Mr Vale de Almeida recollects it. The Telegraph article, published on May 31 1991, was headlined: "Euro headquarters to be blown up."

Mr Johnson's report began: "The Berlaymont building in Brussels, headquarters of the European Community, is to be blown up. Controlled explosions are regarded as the best way of demolishing the 13-storey building, which is to be replaced because of the danger from asbestos used in its construction."

But Mr Johnson's coverage of Brussels – like the at-times rancorous four-and-a-half-years of Brexit negotiations – are now firmly in the past and Mr Vale de Almeida will be hoping his connection with the PM helps him in his new job as EU Ambassador to Court of St James as he gets to grips with the UK's new-found sovereignty.

The Ambassador is keen to talk about how the UK and EU can forge a new "special relationship" to rival the UK's deep links to the USA in coming years.

He says: "There is zero kilometres distance between you and us in the island of Ireland and only a few kilometres across the Channel. And our economies are interdependent, interconnected. Our families are interlinked. So obviously we have to have a special relationship. I can't imagine anything different from that."

He adds: "We could be at the start of a new cycle, a new dawn in the EU-UK relations – the life after Brexit. That's a great potential here. And I think we should invest in it."

This new "special relationship" could show itself this year when Britain hosts the annual meeting of the G7 group of advanced economies in June, and then the United Nations Climate Change Conference in November. Mr Vale de Almeida thinks the UK's sovereignty will give the UK a dominance at the G7 which is actually attended by nine world leaders, six of whom are from Europe (the leaders of the UK, Germany, Italy and France as well as the presidents of the European Commission and Council of Ministers). Mr Vale de Almedia says: "If we join efforts we are six out of nine. I'm sure six can impact on what the nine will decide."

And in the week that Joe Biden replaces Donald Trump as 46th US President, Mr Vale de Almeida sees "potential for cooperation amongst the three of us: the EU, the UK and the US... We need to work with other partners. We cannot do this alone."

Mr Vale de Almeida, 63, a Portuguese national born in Lisbon in 1957, is married, with two children and two grandchildren. He is a Brussels lifer, joining the European Commission in 1982, rising to become one of the EU's most senior diplomats, serving as ambassador to the USA and United Nations.

He took up this post in London a year ago, and admits he is still trying to grasp why Britons voted to leave the EU in 2016. He says: "I try to understand those reasons, but I'm still in the initial phase of my learning curve, having been in the UK only for one year.

"And I'm trying to understand deeply or more deeply what the reasons are. But I respect them. And that's the first approach to it."

Mr Vale de Almeida is speaking to Chopper's Politics podcast and The Telegraph for the first time since the UK/EU trade deal was unveiled last month.

He describes the deal that was finally agreed on Christmas Eve as "fair for both sides", adding: "Sometimes we are tempted to say 'we won, they lost' and things like that. That's not our state of mind and that's not what you expect from here, from us.

"The winners are our citizens and our businesses because first of all, they avoided a no deal. Avoiding no deal was a good thing and creating a framework for our future relationship is so important it gives certainty, predictability to people."

The deal was a "blueprint on which we can build our future relations," he says. Talks on a memorandum of understanding on regulatory cooperation started last week. "I don't think anyone wants to create more obstacles than there should be," he adds.

Mr Vale de Almeida is keen "to pay tribute to the contribution of the UK" to the EU over the past four decades. He is pleased, too, that four million EU nationals – far more than had been expected – have decided to settle in the UK rather than leave and head back to the Continent after Brexit.

"I'm very proud of the EU citizens in the UK. The contribution they make to the British economy, to British society," he says, adding: "I think we are all Europeans. Right?

“Europe is a concept. We are not all members of the European Union, but we are all Europeans. And that is the bedrock of our future cooperation. And that's what I'm focusing on right now."

The Ambassador's memo about "future cooperation" may not have got to the Dutch border guards who confiscated ham sandwiches from drivers arriving by ferry from the UK under post-Brexit rules banning personal imports of meat and dairy products into the EU.

Mr Vale de Almeida does not condemn their actions. "You have to be treated like any other third country, meaning entering the internal market you have to have controls and checks of different nature, including phytosanitary nature," he says.

"For a third country, you don't allow meat products to come in. You're not allowed plant products to come in without being fully [checked] because it can affect your own single market."

Mr Vale de Almeida has little time for companies that are complaining about the red tape now wrapping itself around imports and exports between the UK and EU, saying: "They have to do their homework together with the British administration, to see exactly what they need to do to prepare to get ready for the new reality."

Mr Vale de Almeida pushes back against claims that EU red tape delayed an order for Covid-19 vaccines.

"We are 27 countries. Some are bigger than others. Some have more financial potential than others, some have more bargaining power than others if they have to engage individually with the providers of vaccines.

"We decided otherwise. We said we need to approach this together in full solidarity so that we allow each of our countries, 27 of them, to have the same chance and the same opportunity to have access to vaccines."

He adds: "Of course, the downside of this big purchasing operation is that the producers of vaccines have some difficulty in following all the demand that exists around the world. And sometimes you don't get the vaccines when we want, but we are making an enormous effort."

Mr Vale de Almeida is defiant about the EU's future, scotching forecasts by the EU's bête noire Nigel Farage, the former Ukip party leader, that more EU countries will follow Britain out of the exit door.

The veteran diplomat has been dealing with such talk since the Eurozone crisis a decade ago.

"The question I had every day in 2010 was 'Ambassador, are you still around, is there still a European Union? Who's going to leave next? Greece, Italy, Portugal, Spain?'" he says.

"Well, it never happened. The Euro is still there. There are more members of the Euro now than in 2010 and nobody left. So the doomsday scenarios – they don't necessarily realise in the European Union."

The EU faced similar existential questions last year as the coronavirus pandemic swept across the Continent. "When we started with the Covid crisis, people were saying 'this will be really the end'," he says.

Yet the trading bloc is about to implement "a new innovative, unprecedented financial package recovery scheme," he says.

His message is: the EU is here to stay – and the UK has to live with it. "We can surprise people and I'm sure we will surprise Mr Farage," he says.

Listen to the full interview with Joao Vale de Almeida on Chopper's Politics Podcast on the audio player at the top of this article or on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or your favourite podcast app.