After 20 years in Brussels, even I feel a bit wistful now about the thought of leaving
You know that awkward moment when you say a long and involved goodbye to someone only to find that the two of you are then walking the same way? Well, my past 10 months in the European Parliament have been like that.
It keeps happening. A Brexit date is announced. I pack my office, hold a farewell dinner, do my best to see that my amazing Spanish staff have good jobs to go on to – and then, with thundering bathos, find myself slinking back again.
First we were leaving in March. Then in June. Then in October. Then in January. Even my German colleagues, rarely the first to see the funny side, began to have an amused twitch around their mouths. “Ach, Hannan, you are back again? You love it here really, yes?”
Only now is the fact of our leaving beyond doubt. We are in our last 40 days, our quarantina. As that reality sinks in, the mood in Brussels, oddly enough, is softening. The sneering has given way to something close to wistfulness. “We will miss you,” I keep being told, as if the British Isles were about to be uprooted and deposited in the South Pacific.
Perhaps a certain wistfulness is inevitable. Indeed, I feel the tiniest batsqueak of it myself. My adulthood has, after all, largely been played out in the context of arguments about our relationship with Brussels.
When I first joined the European Parliament in 1999, I had two parents and no wife or children. Many of my life’s landmarks are etched out against an EU-tinged backdrop. It started with my stag night, shortly after I was elected, which my best man, the future Conservative and Ukip MP
Mark Reckless, insisted on organising in Reykjavik as a pro-EFTA gesture. At some point during that epic, schnappsfuelled weekend, a TV reporter persuaded me to film a live interview on why Iceland should stay out of the EU. I obliged, complimenting Icelanders warmly, insistently and repetitively on their wisdom. Locals still tease me about it.
If I tot up the days I have spent in Strasbourg, where the whole Parliament repairs for four days a month in order to keep the French happy, I find that I have lived for the equivalent of nearly two years in a cosy room at the Beaucour hotel. “I’m sure that parrot of yours used to be a lot more talkative when I started,” I said to Claire Lise, the owner, this week. “Yes, Monsieur Hannan. He is getting on – just like you and me.”
It takes an effort of will to remember what the world was like when I began. We still needed travel agents to book our flights and Eurostar tickets. Our constituency correspondence came in stamped envelopes. Newspapers were vast and potent. Television had five channels, supplemented by an occasional Blockbuster video.
After all this time, it would be odd not to feel a twitch of nostalgia. The parks and playgrounds of Brussels, even the corridors of the European Parliament, are infused with memories of my daughters when they were small. The taste of a speculoos biscuit, or of the curious nutro-gloop that Belgians put in their coffee in lieu of milk, can trigger, like Proust’s madeleine, a series of involuntary memories.
I realise, very suddenly and rather to my surprise, that I’ll miss the restrained eccentricity of the art deco houses, the Belgian obsession with finding correct change, even the Euro-English that has become the EU’s unofficial idiom – a kind of simplified pidgin that has evolved its own grammar and syntax, so that “Shall we have a coffee?” becomes “We take a coffee, no?”
But I won’t miss the EU institutions. We were never a good fit there. Our history and geography made us a semi-European country in a way that the other members never really understood. Yes, we are attached to our neighbours. But we will always feel the tug of language and law, hauling us toward more distant continents. As the plain-speaking Labour foreign secretary, Ernie Bevin, put it in 1950: “Britain is not ‘part of Europe’. She is simply not a Luxembourg.”
We now have the opportunity to fulfil the vision that Bevin’s wartime boss, Winston Churchill, set out in his Zurich speech in 1946: that of being a “friend and sponsor” to a United States of Europe, while deepening our links with America and the Commonwealth. All sides should end up being happier.
A final tip for anyone going to Brussels, one which I have until now kept to myself. In a city of often brusque and perfunctory hoteliers, Made in Louise on Rue Veydt is an oasis of hospitality. Its motto, “Feel like at home”, is a textbook example of cringe-making Brussels Euro-English. But, for six years, it truly has felt like home. Thanks, guys.
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