Two World Cups, two female PMS, two blond critics and EU turbulence
To understand where Britain is today in relation to Europe, we must look back at how we got here
The last time England played in the semi-final of the World Cup a woman prime minister was being buffeted by political turbulence over Europe and faced being ousted by a blondhaired Tory critic. It was the summer of 1990 and the EEC (as it still was then) was holding its biennial summit in Dublin. Just a few days later, on July 4, Germany beat England in a penalty shoot-out in Turin that is seared on the memories of all who watched it.
Brexit is book-ended by two football matches. The seeds of the UK’S decision to leave the EU were sown at that Dublin meeting 28 years ago. On July 1, 1990, the first stage of European economic and monetary union (EMU) came into being. To Margaret Thatcher, then prime minister, this was anathema and she was determined it would go ahead only as an ad hoc arrangement, not a fully-fledged federalist enterprise.
But she was about to be ambushed. At Dublin, the concept of a political union was bolted onto EMU and Mrs Thatcher set out to stop it at the next summit in Rome a few months later – a meeting that was to prove fateful.
As Mrs Thatcher recalled in her memoirs: “The others were determined to insert provisions in the communique on political union, none of which I was prepared to accept. They were not interested in compromise. My objections were heard in stony silence. I had no support. I just had to say no.”
Mrs Thatcher observed that, in the space of three years, from when she championed the single market, “the European Community had gone from practical discussions to grandiose schemes of monetary and political union with firm timetables – all without open, principled public debate… The ultimate battle for the future of the Community had been joined.”
It was Mrs Thatcher’s statement to parliament about the outcome of the Rome summit that triggered the events leading to her downfall just three weeks later. Witnessing all of this was The Daily Telegraph’s man in Brussels, one Boris Johnson, who reported on the summit, along with yours truly, who was political correspondent at the time.
It is not too fanciful to say that this was the start of a process that culminated in Brexit. The removal of Mrs Thatcher in a putsch staged by pro-european Tories left a scar in the party that has not healed to this day. The process that began in Rome led directly to Maastricht and the formation of the European Union. The internecine Tory wars that would haunt John Major’s premiership and turn what had been a pro-european party into a Euro-sceptical one were also spawned here.
It left a lasting impression on many of us – including Boris – who had imagined Europe’s federalist aggrandisement to be delusional. Suddenly it was real and nothing would be allowed to stop it; certainly not the tiresome bleatings of the British prime minister about such paltry matters as sovereignty and democracy. At Rome, Mrs Thatcher was waylaid by a triumvirate of Helmut Kohl, François Mitterrand and Jacques Delors and told that even if she did exercise the UK’S veto, economic and monetary union would go ahead anyway. British reservations were relegated to a solitary paragraph in the summit’s conclusions.
When Mr Johnson walked out of the Cabinet on Monday my mind went back to that summit, the moment that the European ideal morphed into an intractable dogmatism immune to any protestations of national exceptionalism. As we have seen in the two years since the UK voted in a referendum to leave the EU, doing so is harder than trying to get out of a religious cult. Some call it the Hotel California option, after the Eagles’ song: “You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave.”
And so it has proved. The negotiating platform on which
Mrs May will now seek a divorce agreement with the EU and, she hopes, set out parameters for the UK’S future relationship, is being constructed entirely on Brussels’ terms, not our own. It is constrained by what we think they will let us have, not dictated by what we want. Brexit was supposed to rekindle national confidence, yet is in danger of snuffing it out.
As Mr Johnson said in his resignation letter, we have been “suffocated by needless self-doubt”. We do not believe in ourselves because, after 45 years in the EU in one guise or another, we have forgotten how to. At every stage of Europe’s development since 1990, Britain has been drawn deeper into a set of supra-national governmental and judicial structures against our better judgment.
Even many people who voted Remain in 2016 did so with a heavy heart, not because they had a benign view of Europe but because they feared the dislocation of leaving. The chief campaigners for staying in, like David Cameron, never made a positive case for doing so.
Ever since the summer of 1990, the EU has grown in size and deepened in its federalist nature: the very opposite of what we expected to happen with enlargement. The UK was a reluctant onlooker as it adopted a single currency, established a central bank, removed its internal borders and devised its own foreign policy. The EU has taken on the trappings of an embryonic superstate and will continue to do so. If we had decided to stay in, the status quo was not an option. The EU was moving inexorably in a direction with which none but the most federalist europhile would ever be happy. It was always going to be a huge decision; but I naively never thought we would end up cast in the role of supplicant simply for exercising our democratic right under an EU treaty.
To understand where we are today we must remember how we got here. Looking back to 1990, the auguries turned out bad for the blond-haired Tory critic, Michael Heseltine, who never wore the crown, and also for the woman prime minister who was forced out of office. Perhaps history is about to repeat itself, though the England football team can at least change it in part tonight by showing us that self-belief has not been entirely extinguished. The depressing thought is that by the time they make it to another semi-final, the European question will be unresolved. If you think it’s all over, think again.