Half In, Half Out by Andrew Adonis

Author:Andrew Adonis [Andrew Adonis]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781785904356
Publisher: Biteback Publishing
Published: 2018-07-29T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 10

JOHN MAJOR

CHRIS PATTEN

‘It is in the interests of Britain … to be part of the development of our continent. By part I do not mean a walk-on part; I do not mean simply being a member. I mean playing a leading role in the European Community.’

JOHN MAJOR, HOUSE OF COMMONS, SEPTEMBER 1992

The metaphors multiply, ransacking a whole lexicon of modes of transport. The British express train with tabloid editors heaving coals into the fire chamber, rough rides across the sleepers – clickety-click – towards a violent crash. The car with the Conservative Party in the back seat (who knows who is in the front?) speeds increasingly out of control towards a fork in the road. The Not-so-Easyjet takes off, with no one at ground control able to tell the pilot where or when he is to land. Or perhaps instead of all this ‘enemies of the people’ stuff, the ship of state, liberated at last, weighs anchor and sets course, the wind of freedom in its sails, for the open seas and distant horizons. Take your pick.

Well, I took mine years ago: an ‘enemy of the people,’ guilty as charged. I guess this affects whatever I say about John Major and the impact of the European debate on his seven-year premiership during the course of which the roots of today’s problems were dug in and watered.

There is another confession that I must make. John is a friend, the ablest member of my political generation in the Conservative Party, the cleverest of the three party leaders for whom I worked, and one of the most decent people to lead both country and party for years. His premiership was both undermined and attenuated by arguments about Europe, the source and the consequences of which I will try to describe in this chapter without plodding from one European Council meeting to another.

It is stretching vocabulary to describe this story as a tragedy. There is nothing resembling the Oresteia about it – blood only occasionally stains the carpet. Nor is there the sort of history-shaking drama of Suez, when a clever, vain and ill Prime Minister reran history and discovered in the course of doing so the new reality of Britain’s role in the world – a middle-ranking power whose future as a great nation was threatened by its delusion that it was still a great power. It is this same abuse of history that was part of the problem facing John, and it has morphed into today’s national psycho-drama.

Let’s begin with the history. Our deliberate choice – despite the hope of our best friend across the Atlantic – not to take part in the creation of what was to become the European Union has dogged our subsequent membership. Some years after we declined to be one of the founding fathers, having failed to find an alternative to common market membership in the European Free Trade Association (EFTA), we concluded that we should no longer exclude ourselves from a historic European cooperation in which some notional de jure sovereignty was traded in for greater de facto sovereignty.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.