Inside the talks: How ‘One Day More’ from Les Miserables became UK negotiators’ Brexit theme song

At times when their spirits were at their lowest, Britain’s Brexit negotiators reached for the songbook of one of the West End’s biggest musicals for inspiration. 

Exhausted officials took heart from singing hits from Les Miserables, the musical set during the anti-monarchist Paris Uprising of 1832, during marathon Brexit talks with Brussels. 

As the talks dragged deep into the Christmas holidays, officials serenaded each other before descending into the EU’s Borshette conference centre, which one UK official said was like a “1970s car park”.

The song that grabbed their imaginations and stiffened their spines was the rousing “One Day More”, a showstopping call to arms that heralds the eve of the “people’s revolution” but also nods to the fears of the outnumbered and outgunned revolutionaries as they meet at the “barricades of freedom”.  

“Raise the flag of freedom high,” the chorus swells, “there’s a new world to be won.”

“Do you hear the people sing?” the song asks, in what could easily have been a reminder to Lord Frost’s team to carry out the instructions given to them by the referendum.

As negotiators filed past the desks of their comrades to another anonymous negotiating room in London or Brussels, they could expect a cheeky chorus of “The Room Where It Happens”, from the musical Hamilton. 

“No one else was in the room where it happened,” the song goes. “No one really knows how the game is played. The art of the trade. How the sausage gets made.”

The camaraderie was entrenched by using WhatsApp “massively” during the negotiations to swap jokes and intelligence during the talks.

Officials confessed a deep sense of relief that no stray messages found their way onto groups shared with Michel Barnier’s team. “They were none more humourless than the Dutch,” one British negotiator said, mischievously. 

The banter was also a much-needed morale-booster. With Christmas fast approaching, many had spent more than two weeks away from home locked in torturous negotiations. “It has been like pulling out my eyelashes one by one. It is painful but everything has to be so precise,” said one UK official involved in the talks. 

Lord Frost warned his negotiators “from the outset” that Brussels would look to tie the UK into its regulatory orbit. But the man with “superpowers of calm” made it crystal clear that no deal was not a failure if it meant Britain was free. 

“That was a relief,” an official said. Even if if there was a NNO, which stood for “no negotiated outcome”, he would still have done his job.” 

“We’ve done things no one expected,” the official said, comparing the EU’s initial demands to the final deal. “Zero-tariff, zero-quota is less than one per cent different to the Canada trade deal we wanted,” another said. 

Lord Frost handed the British team a grid with four negotiating modes – teenager, tank, mouse and leader. An official said: “He said that the EU tended towards the first two and the UK was too often a mouse. We needed to be a leader in the room and rise above things.”

The EU is accustomed to taking a position in trade negotiations and holding it until the other side caves. “They are used to being the immovable object. This time we were. They found it difficult to deal with out obstinacy,”  an official said. 

Even when negotiators were exhausted by repeating ad nauseam that Britain was a sovereign equal and independent coastal state, Lord Frost sent them back in to do it all again.

“They would act like they were a juggernaut and we were a dinghy. There might be some truth to their position but there is also a fantastic arrogance,” one official said. 

When the UK and EU were at loggerheads over the principle of sovereignty, one negotiator would simply ask: “Would you be tied to our court and our parliament?”

The trade talks were thrown into disarray by the coronavirus outbreak, which forced negotiations online in March but also threw up some unlikely negotiating heroes and villains. 

“At that point we were stonewalling, which was easier done remotely. I turned the camera off,” an official admitted. 

But the virtual talks also gave negotiators a chance to peer into each other’s homes. “Some people had Liverpool scarves on the wall and there was one guy in Derbyshire who negotiated from his shed,” a source said. 

The shed negotiator was one of the team’s most effective operators, but he had competition. 

“One woman on our side sat in her kitchen with a bouquet of lilies on one side and a f*** off set of knives on the other. It was perfect for her,” an official said. “The best room on their side was one guy’s blood red room with strange hats and a bird cage with what looked like a dead bird in it.”

Mr Barnier unwittingly caused widespread mirth on the British team after twice singling out one official for a dressing down. Little did the EU’s chief negotiator know that the official in question was known as the nicest guy on the team as he castigated the official for his “aggression”.

“He called me out twice for accusing the other side of bad faith,” the victim of Mr Barnier’s displeasure said. “I think it was because I was explicit about where we disagreed.

“I was doing everything other than accusing them of bad faith. I think I actually outlined what an act of good faith would be.”

A different negotiator said: “Certainly we had out moments of frustration, but there was also a sense of shared endeavour.”

Unfortunately, due to coronavirus, the celebrations when the deal was finally done were muted. 

An official said: “When we finished our table we were in this huge room where we’d had horrible moments, accusing each other of breaches of trust and that sort of thing. Then at the end we couldn’t celebrate, we couldn’t shake hands but no one wanted to leave the room. So we just sat there.”