'David' and 'Angela' politely ignore their differences during wide-ranging 90-minute discussion streamed worldwide
It was billed as a town hall get-together, taking place in the breezy "sky lobby" of Angela Merkel's cuboid chancellery with a handpicked audience of students and diplomats. On the agenda: the future of the relationship between citizens and the state. In the end though the fireside chat, which touched on everything from floppy discs and Commodore 64s to the Arab spring and shitschtorming, (as Merkel put it) turned into a focused discussion about the future of Europe.
David Cameron, introduced to the audience as the "champion of twitterers" with a million followers (though, it was quickly added, he did not write his own tweets) argued that Europe needed to rethink its raison d'être. It was, he said, an organisation that worked best on the human level and it seemed to have lost its way.
"The things that have worked have been when Europe has been fuelled by collaboration between people, but it has not worked so well when plans have been imposed from above," he said. Though he didn't mention the euro, it was hard to ignore the connection.
Its future, and Britain's in it, Cameron said, was dependent on the relationships between the people of Europe "rather than the attempt to cook up new plans and new bureaucracy", adding how "baffling the processes, the procedures" of European institutions were. Forget the treaties and the complex legislative framework, "cheap air travel and being able to use your mobile phone all over Europe" had done far more to "establish a European identity" than the European parliament or the blue and yellow EU flag combined. Merkel hardly disagreed.
"Angela" and "David", as they referred to each other throughout – he, billed as the great eurosceptic, she as the mother of European values – were at great pains during the 90-minute discussion, which was streamed live to a worldwide audience (albeit crashing every few seconds), to stress their commonalities. And if there were differences (the euro, eurobonds, transaction tax, to name just a few), they were mostly politely ignored.
Cameron said that while there were certain issues on which they agreed to differ, such as nuclear power, "Angela and I agree about many things". He cited free enterprise, as one, and Nato membership as another. And he added, "We both think that getting rid of budget deficits is important," which steered the debate neatly on to the issue of Greece, whose repeat election, effectively a referendum on its euro membership, is looming.
That was Merkel's chance to jump in and defend her much-criticised austerity policy towards Greece. Greeks she said, needed to believe in the "very great effort" to save it. The amount pumped into the Greek economy so far amounted to 1.5 times the GDP of Greece, she said, while the post-world war two Marshall plan had amounted to just 3% of European GDP. But she said she suspected there was a lack of identification in Greece for what was being done to help. "At least as important as the huge amount of money is the belief there that it can actually achieve something," she said. That, she felt, was missing.
But anyone discussing Europe, she said, in a remark that drew the largest sniggers of the afternoon along with her reference to being shitschtormed, should also consider why some countries thought it normal to pay taxes, and others did not.
While the group was on the subject of how the EU might increase its competitiveness, why not, one student asked Cameron, boost the feel-good factor on the continent by repeating the UK's recent jubilee holiday as a regular occurrence across Europe?
"Well, it's not good for the economy," said the PM, very much on message, "even if it's good for the soul."