Matthew Lynn

Well, that will teach them to go around manufacturing a vaccine against a global virus at cost price, and at record speed. The European Union has today said it is planning to take legal action against the pharmaceuticals conglomerate AstraZeneca for failing to deliver enough doses of the Oxford shot on time.  No doubt European Commission president Ursula von der Leyen and her team are planning to be exonerated. They will finally be able to demonstrate that the whole vaccine debacle, for which the Commission has taken so much flak, and which has already caused thousands of unnecessary deaths across continent, was all the fault of the Anglo-Swedish company. No doubt the untrustworthy British will also be implicated.

Regrets? It turns out he has a few. The former president of the European Commission Jean-Claude Juncker does not seem too bothered by the EU's miserable growth rate during his time in office, its geopolitical marginalisation, or indeed the growing power of corporate lobbyists in Brussels. But there is one thing that makes him at least a little sad. Not deploying the formidable force of his personality to swing the British referendum behind staying in the EU. Juncker now reckons the former PM's judgement was a couple of bottles short of a full case In an interview this week, Juncker revealed that David Cameron told him to keep out of the campaign. As in so many other ways, Juncker now reckons the former PM's judgement was a couple of bottles short of a full case.

Short of dropping Harry Kane from the England team, and replacing him with Andy Carroll on the grounds that what we really need is a big man up front, it is hard to imagine a footballing decision that could be less popular. Twelve of Europe's biggest clubs, including Manchester City, Chelsea and Liverpool, have announced plans for a break-away ‘European Super League’. Alongside the domestic competitions, the 12 elite clubs would play each other regularly season after season. Football decided 30 years ago to become a big money game, and has been rewarded with massive global audiences The reaction, to put it mildly, has not been 100 per cent positive, and not just from the now empty terraces. The Prime Minister Boris Johnson condemned the plan on Twitter.

The ports would reek from the smell of rotting fish. Factories would close en masse as orders got snarled up in red tape. There would be chaos at the borders as deliveries were blocked, and services would hit a wall of ‘non-tariff barriers’ that would make it impossible for British firms to sell them across Europe.  We have heard a lot over the last few weeks about how much disruption our departure from the European Union was causing for exporters, and there were lots of stories about firms that might go out of business or would have to move production to France or Poland. Membership of the single market, despite all the hype around it, doesn’t make much difference to most exporters But hold on. The actual data is telling a different story.

The country would remain implacably divided for a generation, with Remain and Leave replacing class and geography as the new fault line in British politics. International investors would take a generation to come round to the idea. And campaigns to re-join the EU would grow in strength as the chaos deepened. Even a few months ago, it was possible to argue that Britain's tortured debate about leaving the EU would run and run without any seeming end. And yet since then something very interesting has happened. The UK’s comparative success at rolling out Covid-19 vaccines has in effect sealed the Brexit deal. The debate is now over, both here, and around the world.

Boris Johnson might have started back-pedalling furiously. He might have tried to dismiss it as an off-the-cuff comment. And the spin doctor might have preferred it to have remained private. Even so, the Prime Minister was surely right when he told MPs last night that ‘greed’ and ‘capitalism’ gave us the Covid-19 vaccine. And rather than backing away from the remarks, the PM should be doubling down on them. He was spot on. Free enterprise and the multinational corporation are getting us out of this mess, and we need to talk about that a lot more than we do. The pioneering MRNA technology used by BioNTech and Moderna was funded by Wall Street through years of hopeless losses It was typical Boris.

We have to rid the world of vaccine nationalism. No one is protected until we are all protected. And we need, above all, solidarity to fight a virus which by its nature does not respect borders or boundaries. Over much of the last year, European Union officials, led by the President of the Commission Ursula von der Leyen, have led the world in grandiose rhetoric about how we have to lead a global effort to fight Covid-19, contrasting its own noble internationalism with the grubby self-interest of the likes of Donald Trump or indeed Boris Johnson. But hold on. After much speculation, the EU has itself started firing the first shots in the vaccine wars, permitting Italy to block the export of 250,000 doses of the Oxford-AstraZeneca jab to Australia.

It was meant to be a special relationship. After the tumultuous Trump years, President Biden was planning to reset relations with the European Union, Inherently liberal, rules-based, and engaged with climate change, it would be a natural ally, and far more so than a UK still tainted by Brexit. The Biden team were no doubt looking forward to working closely with officials in Brussels, Paris, and Berlin to repair the damage of the last four years and put the world on a more rational course.  But hold on. It is not going according to plan. There are already reports that the White House is growing increasingly frustrated with the EU. And in truth, that rift is only going to get wider and wider in the months to come.