Any normal, sane person would get angry at Europe’s high-handed attitude

The EU is trying to split the United Kingdom. Yet Major and Blair turn their fire on London, not Brussels

If the representative of a foreign power (or powers) says that your country should be split for the greater convenience of that power (or powers), your reaction, if you are a normal person, is to get angry. This week, Michel Barnier did exactly that by saying that the EU would insist on Northern Ireland remaining inside the EU customs union when the rest of the UK moves outside it. At EU orders, the United Kingdom would have to impose customs checks between one part of its territory (Northern Ireland) and another (mainland Britain). In her tightly controlled way, Theresa May got angry. The Barnier plan would “threaten the constitutional integrity of the UK”, she said, stating plain fact.

You – the same normal person I describe – would surely expect your nation’s senior politicians to protest at this suggested annexation, regardless of their views on Brexit. Yet, coinciding with M Barnier, two British ex-prime Ministers spoke, and made no protest whatsoever.

First up was Sir John Major. On Wednesday, he demanded a free vote in Parliament – as opposed to the customary whipped one – on the final Brexit deal, and nudged towards a second referendum. Those of us who remember the Major government could not but smile. In order to push through the Maastricht Treaty – the agreement which invented the euro, bringing woe to our continent – Mr Major organised the most ferocious whipping. Far from encouraging a free vote, he turned the European issue into an issue of confidence: his party’s Maastricht opponents had to vote for it to save the government.

As for the referendum which Sir John suddenly touts, perish the thought in his day! In her last ever vote in the House of Commons, in 1992, Margaret Thatcher was one of a small group of Conservatives who voted for a referendum on Maastricht, an idea firmly rejected by one J Major, Prime Minister.

In his speech on Wednesday, Sir John, in his pleasant, moderate tone, reminded us that negotiations are a process of “give and take”. At no point, however, did he suggest Brussels should give anything; nor did he criticise it for trying to take, the latest grab being Northern Ireland. One hundred per cent of his criticism was reserved for the Government of his own country and the leadership of his own party.

Tony Blair, who originally built his career on upstaging John Major, went much further. Like Sir John, he opposes Brexit. Unlike him, he actually went abroad to drum up recruits against the democratic decision of his own people. In Brussels itself, on Thursday, he incited his audience to help him persuade Brexit voters that it is all “more complicated” than they had thought. Brexit, he thinks, is part of the populism which Europe must fight because it “risks destruction of democracy’s soul”.

Only Mr Blair is capable of such “magical thinking” that he can turn the largest vote for anything in British history into a threat to democracy. The people must be made to vote again, in order to produce the right result.

Warming to his theme, Mr Blair declared that, faced with the rising threat of China and India, Europe must integrate further to become a massive trade bloc and a bloc of “values”. “The rationale for Europe today,” he raved, “is not peace, but power.” And who, exactly, should wield that power on its behalf? Mr Blair was too modest to say; but the message from the great leader, exiled to a foreign court hostile to his home country, was clear. Hail Bonnie Prince Tony, the king over the water!

Those rash enough to attack Mr Blair when he took large sums from corrupt and exotic regimes in return for advice on their image should eat their words. He was far more harmlessly employed dancing attendance on some despot in Kazakhstan than he is fomenting trouble against the people he once ruled.

Earlier that morning, on the Today programme, Mr Blair said that it was “not just disappointing, but sickening” that people were prepared “to sacrifice peace in Northern Ireland on the altar of Brexit”. That would be a good description of the fanatically proremain Sinn Fein, who have collapsed the Good Friday Agreement’s powersharing government for more than a year. But of course it was the other side of the argument which Mr Blair was attacking – the people who point out that the Good Friday Agreement (GFA) has virtually nothing to do with the EU. Such people know that the Northsouth open border was not invented by the EU or Mr Blair or the GFA, and that Britain and the Irish Republic agree that no hard border is wanted today. The only body trying to harden that border, obsessed by the dogmatic uniformity of its trade rules, is the EU.

Surprisingly, the European Parliament has produced a report by a splendid Swedish customs official called Lars Karlsson. It sets out how goods could move freely across a post-brexit North-south border in Ireland, monitored by electronic customs procedures and “trusted trade arrangements”, as already happens between Norway and Sweden. The process is uncontroversial. Needless to say, Mr Blair has paid not the slightest attention. Nor, despite his plea to “stay pragmatic”, has M Barnier.

Yesterday, Mrs May set out her “five tests” for a good Brexit deal. They sound perfectly sensible, though they will be used to box her in later. She is right to err on the side of friendly platitudes rather than sharp-tongued retorts, more statesmanlike than the nasty jokes of Jean-claude Juncker or the Savoyard disdain of M Barnier.

There are two things wrong with her approach, however. The first is that she perpetuates her earlier indecisions. The reason M Barnier can attempt his offensive land grab of Northern Ireland is because, back in December, Mrs May promised simultaneously to remove the United Kingdom from the European Internal Market and customs union and yet to preserve them in part of it – Northern Ireland – thus producing a document which this column described at the time as “unstable”.

The second is that she and her colleagues are not sniffing the political wind. There is something disappointing about the troublemaking of Sir John, distasteful about the arrogance of M Barnier, and – to use his own word – “sickening” about the attempt by Mr Blair to get back in the game by running down Britain abroad. Mrs May could make much more of this.

This week, these and many other hostile voices, including Jeremy Corbyn’s, have come together, each echoing the other and trying to frighten the rest of us. One realises how right was the instinct, expressed in the 2016 Leave vote, that Brussels and its supporters lack good faith. They look down on us. This is being proved every week, so why on earth should we change our mind and stay?

Our man in Brussels, Sir Julian King, is urging the European Commission not to impose “a Carthaginian peace” on Britain. Ancient Rome burnt Carthage to the ground and sowed it with salt, so that it could never recover. The fact that Sir Julian speaks this way shows that he, like most British diplomats, is a Brexit defeatist. But he may well be right about how the Barniers, Junckers and Verhofstadts regard their task. If he is, we will get not a fair deal, but a deliberate humiliation. We need to be ready to make our own way in the wider, freer world.