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The Chancellor is said to have been confused about the word “barrage” before Mr Cameron told her it meant “Blitzkrieg”. <\/p>\n
Mr Oliver said: “At that moment everybody thought, ‘don’t mention the war, that’s probably not the best thing to do’.<\/p>\n
“But they all started laughing and she looked at him as if he was a bit of a naughty schoolboy and she suggested that she was prepared to say yes to this.”<\/p>\n
Mr Cameron was seeking a prolonged emergency brake that would have curbed EU migrants’ access to benefits in Britain.<\/p>\n
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He floated the idea as he tried to re-negotiate Britain’s membership of the bloc in a bid to stave off a rising tide of Euroscepticism at home.<\/p>\n
Mr Oliver described how Mrs Merkel sprung the visit on him without much warning.<\/p>\n
He said: “David Cameron had a bad back at the time and one way of dealing with it was just lying down on the floor.<\/p>\n
“I was flicking through my phone looking at messages and then suddenly news came through that the German delegation was coming and that they were going to be here in less than a minute.<\/p>\n
DON’T MISS: “We both jumped up and started clearing up and Angela Merkel came in, and I remember her sitting down opposite me.<\/p>\n “She looked like she was finally ready to do business and that she’d really focused on this.”<\/p>\n Despite Mr Cameron’s apparent charm, Mrs Merkel ultimately rejected his proposal and the Prime Minister was forced to return to Britain to give a speech on immigration where he had hoped to unveil the emergency brake.<\/p>\n Mr Cameron later claimed it was EU leaders’ failure to grant him this element of his immigration plans that proved a major factor in Britain voting to leave the EU in the 2016 Brexit referendum.<\/p>\n Iain Duncan Smith, Mr Cameron’s former Work and Pensions Secretary later claimed that the Prime Minister had offered Germany a “de facto veto” on his plans.<\/p>\n
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