Juncker’s chain-smoking made Theresa May ‘croak,’ Brexit book reveals

LONDON — Jean-Claude Juncker smoked so heavily during crunch Brexit meetings that then-U.K. PM Theresa May lost her voice, a new book on Brexit by a veteran political journalist has revealed.

“No Way Out” — by the Sunday Times political commentator Tim Shipman — chronicles the key negotiations and parliamentary wrangling over Brexit between 2017 and 2019.

In the book, Shipman writes that Juncker — president of the European Commission during negotiations with the U.K. government — “chain-smoked strong continental cigarettes, despite EU rules banning smoking in offices” during a four-hour Strasbourg meeting with May in March 2019.

“The smoke played havoc with her throat, reducing her voice to a strangled croak,” Shipman writes. “She developed a streaming cold — not what the PM needed ahead of a divisive week in Parliament.”

But, according to Shipman, May was “too polite to complain” — despite one of her aides anonymously labelling Juncker a “rude prick.”

The pair sealed revisions to May’s ill-fated Brexit deal in the meeting. As May tried to sell the revised deal to the House of Commons in the aftermath, her voice visibly cracked.

The book recounts how parliamentary authorities were concerned about May’s health at the time.

“Unknown to MPs, a doctor had been called and the House of Commons authorities were so concerned about May’s health that the serjeant-at-arms [a Commons official] drew up a plan to evacuate her,” Shipman writes.

In the vote that followed May’s presentation of the revised deal — agreed with Juncker in the smoky meeting in Strasbourg — May was defeated by 149 votes, despite the last-minute concessions she had secured from the EU.

A week later she told her party that she would “not lead the U.K. in the next stage of Brexit negotiations,” indicating her intention to resign shortly. She left office two months later after her party finished 5th in European Parliament elections.

“If she can’t even get someone to stop smoking, she’s hardly going to get anything more from them,” Shipman quotes an anonymous Conservative minister as saying of May’s meeting with Juncker.