Former UK ambassador says ‘luck and leadership’ helped deliver Gib treaty 

There was “nothing inevitable” about the UK/EU treaty on Gibraltar, which “could well not have existed for decades” had it not been for a combination of “luck and leadership”, Hugh Elliott, the UK’s former ambassador to Madrid, told a seminar in Cambridge last week. 

Describing the agreement as “an astonishing treaty”, Mr Elliott reflected on how past efforts toward pragmatic arrangements between Gibraltar and Spain had always been “tripped up by one thing or another”.

Among the elements that contributed to a successful negotiation were “continuity of government in Gibraltar” during the process, the PSOE remaining in power after the July 2023 general election and the UK government’s continued commitment to the talks despite being “preoccupied with its own shenanigans” after the July 2024 general election. 

Mr Elliott said “we were actually very close to crunch point before both those elections”, even if each had set the process back by months. 

“I’d turn on the news to find that one or other country had called a general election just before there was supposed to be a meeting of our Prime Ministers or something, and I'd put my head in my hands and say, ‘okay, that's another six months minimum down the drain’,” Mr Elliott said. 

Mr Elliott said had the Spanish Socialists not formed government after Spain’s 2023 election, “we would have had a very much harder negotiation”. 

He praised the role played by the “powerful triumvirate” of Chief Minister Fabian Picardo, Deputy Chief Minister Dr Joseph Garcia and Attorney General Michael Llamas, highlighting too the role of Spanish Foreign Minister Jose Manuel Albares, even before he took that post. 

He singled out others too including Lindsay Appleby, the UK’s chief negotiator and later ambassador to the EU; Jose Pascual Marco Martinez, Spain’s chief negotiator and later ambassador to the UK; and the late Antonio Garcia Ferrer, who headed the Gibraltar office at the Ministry for Foreign Affairs in Madrid, who he described as “a remarkable man” with an “extraordinarily constructive attitude”. 

“His loss was a great loss that we all felt,” Mr Elliott said. 

Mr Elliott said everyone in the negotiation had worked to deliver an agreement “focused on people, not prejudice” and that this “idealism in politics” was “remarkable and sustained”. 

“As well as luck and leadership, it was trust and friendship,” he said. 

“Because when you have spent, through Covid and beyond, interminable hours going round in circles about exactly the same things, you either turn, I suspect, into the deepest of enemies or into rather good friends.” 

And he added: “There was no deadline, there was no inevitability.” 

“Most of any sort of previous negotiations [on Gibraltar] have failed, and yet this one, this one was successful. I think it's a remarkable and an astonishing agreement.” 

LEGAL SEMINAR 

The former British diplomate was speaking during a seminar held at Trinity College organised by the Centre for European Legal Studies in Cambridge. 

The seminar heard contributions from academics and lawyers on different aspects of the treaty ranging from alignment with EU laws and dispute resolution, to customs and mobility arrangements. 

Among the speakers was Jamie Trinidad, KC, a Gibraltarian lawyer and Cambridge academic, who acknowledged that the treaty included “difficult trade-offs” in areas such as immigration controls, while stressing the role of Gibraltarian politicians in the negotiation. 

“It’s important to underscore that all of these uncomfortable aspects of the treaty are underpinned by Gibraltarian consent,” he said. 

“This is not old-style colonial treaty making. It reflects well on the modern, non-colonial constitutional relationship that Gibraltar and the UK currently enjoy, although we could of course always have more self-government.” 

Alejandro Del Valle, a professor of international law at the University of Cadiz, said the treaty represented a “historic win, win, win” but nonetheless said many questions remained unanswered, describing them as “four mysteries and one elephant”. 

He reflected on how the treaty had been negotiated in “absolute secrecy” and that this has meant very little information for political parties and public opinion in Spain. 

He said too that the issue of “democratic consultation” was a thorny one because opposition parties in Spain believed the agreement should be voted in EU national parliaments rather than just the European Parliament as has been agreed, adding this could yet be the subject of a challenge before the European Court of Justice. 

Prof del Valle raised concerns too about the implementation of the treaty, adding that the administrative agreements that will bring it into force had yet to be published. 

“The choice – and I’m not in favour of that – has been to make a very, very, very long treaty, which is very risky when putting it into practice,” he said. 

He cautioned too about the implications of any potential change of government in the UK to Reform or in Spain to an administration that involved Vox, adding: “Will it be a long-lasting treaty?”  

While “we don’t know what the PP is going to vote in the European Parliament” or what it will do if it wins the next general election, its support for a recent Vox motion in the Spanish parliament opposing the agreement is “a bad sign”. 

As for the “big elephant in a very little room”, he was referring to the military base. 

“30,000 Gibraltarians are usually very loyal and very happy” when there is a visit by a warship or nuclear submarine, “but 300,000 Spaniards who live in the area are not very happy with these visits”. 

Gibraltarian lawyer Peter Montegriffo, KC, spoke about the importance of mobility to Gibraltar’s gaming sector, which was outside the treaty and would not be impacted in terms of changes to gaming duties or corporate taxes, 

He explained that around 50% of the workforce in the Gibraltar economy comes in across the frontier every day. 

“That explains why such prominence was given to the importance of mobility in this treaty,” Mr Montegriffo added. 

And he also pointed to another important issue that he hoped would be addressed, namely that many of the financial services and gaming companies that relocate to Gibraltar or establish a presence on the Rock often bring staff from the UK. 

“If that staff has to live in Gibraltar and can’t live in Spain, then that will mean that not everybody can afford the property prices in Gibraltar and there’s a limit, physically, as to how many we can fit on this Rock,” he said. 

“So that is an interesting feature that I think should be addressed given the purpose of the treaty is to create this shared zone of prosperity between ourselves and the adjoining Campo.” 

“If you’re going to do that, you don’t want to make difficult one of the important elements of this dynamic, which is attracting Anglo Saxon business and operators to Gibraltar and the region in the way that we’ve seen over the last decade.”