What will Boris Johnson bring back from Brussels?

Since the formation of the European Union, it has been a habit for British prime ministers to try to define their premiership via a row with the rest of the bloc, especially given the laudatory domestic newspaper headlines such disputes engender.

The leading exponent was Margaret Thatcher, ironically in many ways the architect of the single market from which Boris Johnson is struggling to organise the UK’s retreat.

For four years between 1980 and 1984, she demanded the UK’s contributions to the then European Economic Community be adjusted, warning that otherwise she would withhold VAT payments, and famously demanding: “I want my money back.” The crisis finally came to a head at Fontainebleau in 1984, where a British civil servant had to be put on Thatcher watch to ensure she kept her temper. Helmut Kohl, the German chancellor at the time, later recalled his French counterpart, François Mitterrand, whispering to him: “I have just about had enough of these endless discussions. I think we should agree amongst ourselves that we will offer her nothing, nothing, nothing.”

Later, as she noticed the foreign ministers failing to get down to their appointed job of settling the UK budget problem, and instead swapping stories and joking, she exclaimed: “How dare they? We saved all their necks in the war.” Her technique, her diplomats said, was built on her mastery of detail, carrying not only her briefing notes but “handbag points” to force final submission and “stiletto notes” to puncture her interlocutor’s hypocrisy.

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John Major, initially an agnostic on Europe, used a more tactile, patient negotiating style than his predecessor. “You catch more flies with honey than vinegar,” he reasoned. At Maastricht in 1992 he negotiated an opt-out for the UK not just from economic and monetary union but also from the social chapter. Major’s technique was to sit solemnly, almost pleasurably, declining to accept the logic of being one against 11. “It’s no good asking me. I can’t do it. I won’t do it,” he would say.

“Game Set and Match”, the phrase invented at 3am by an overinventive press officer to sum up his success, was never one that passed Major’s lips, or how he viewed relations with Europe. Yet in some ways it helped him win the 1992 election, only to suffer the exit from the European exchange rate mechanism five months later, a humiliation that lost him the support of the Sun and led to his landslide defeat by Tony Blair in 1997.

But even pro-European Blair had his fights with Brussels, wrecking a summit in June 2005 by rejecting a cut in the UK rebate, and irritating his fellow leaders by demanding greater economic reform and questioning their obsession with treaty changes. However, he struggled less with EU leaders than a canny negotiator closer to home – his chancellor, Gordon Brown. Blair was never able to convince him that the UK economy had met the Treasury’s five tests to join the euro.

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After eventually succeeding his rival, Brown tried to turn over a new leaf with fellow EU leaders, but ended up becoming the only one of them not to travel to Portugal to sign the Lisbon treaty. He ended up having to sign the treaty alone in Brussels, apparently so embarrassed he refused to look up. Brown’s aides split on whether to say he had been unable to go to Lisbon due to a diary clash, or to snub European integration. Both versions got briefed out in an episode that summed up the faults in Brown’s governing style.

David Cameron, with Ukip on his back and faced with backbench rebellions, vetoed the EU Treaty on Stability, Coordination, and Governance in December 2011 after 10 hours of talks. His 3am walkout after demanding a protocol allowing London to opt out of proposed changes on financial services shocked his EU colleagues.

The PM returned to London as some sort of hero, enjoying a temporary boost in the polls and believing he could ride the Eurosceptic tiger. In 2014, he tried to pull off the trick again by blocking the appointment of Jean-Claude Juncker as EU commission president, replicating the feat of Major who vetoed Jean-Luc Dehaene at a summit in Corfu in 1994. But Cameron held no veto, and found himself totally isolated in a humbling display of the lack of British influence. It was not the last time Cameron misread Germany’s willingness to help Britain out.

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As Johnson prepares to travel to Brussels, claiming to have all the cards, he can only be hoping that the German chancellor, Angela Merkel, will finally come good. If not, the UK will be walking out once again, but this time into the unknown.