PHIL’S BASIL FAWLTY MOMENT

Trying to act tough, he calls Brussels ‘the enemy’. Then has to apologise. And oh, yes, says he won’t resign

PHILIP Hammond tried to talk tough on Europe yesterday, describing the EU as ‘the enemy’ while visiting the United States.

But the Chancellor was rapidly denounced by one MP for acting ‘like Basil Fawlty on holiday’.

And within an hour of making his comment Mr Hammond was performing an embarrassing U-turn, taking to Twitter to apologise for a ‘poor choice of words’.

His about- turn came as he refused to resign and fought back against criticism that he is ‘sabotaging’ Brexit and undermining Theresa May.

Arriving in Washington to meet global finance chiefs at an International Monetary Fund meeting, Mr Hammond claimed he is fully behind the Prime Minister and backed her speeches on the UK’s Brexit stance at Lancaster House in January and in Florence last month.

A number of Conservative backbenchers have called on the Chancellor to quit over his stance on Brexit. But Mr Hammond said yesterday: ‘My message is this: I under- stand that passions are high. I understand people have very strong views about this. But we’re all going to the same place.

‘We all have the same agenda. We’re all signed up to the Prime Minister’s Lancaster House speech. We’ve all signed up to the Article 50 letter. We’re all behind the speech she made in Florence.’

He added: ‘The enemy, the opponents, are out there on the other side of the table. Those are the people that we have to negotiate with. We have to negotiate hard to get the very best deal for Britain.’

In his Twitter apology Mr Hammond said: ‘In an interview today I was making the point that we are united at home. I regret I used a poor choice of words.’ He added: ‘ We will work with our friends and partners in the EU on a mutually beneficial Brexit deal #noenemieshere.’

Labour’s Peter Dowd, a shadow Treasury minister, said Mr Hammond’s remarks about the EU being an enemy were both foolish and a sign that he was ‘clearly feeling the pressure from Tory MPs calling for him to be sacked’.

‘The tone of this rhetoric will obviously not unblock negotiations or help protect our economic interests,’ said Mr Dowd. ‘The Chancellor should be putting the country before the infighting in his own party when he is representing us overseas, and refrain from acting like Basil Fawlty on holiday.’

One MP told MailOnline: ‘ He has been told he has got to row in behind Brexit and be enthusiastic. He has tried to do that and messed it up. He has made a total Horlicks.’

Mr Hammond’s U-turn marred what had been a fighting performance from the Chancellor from the moment he arrived in the US. He flatly refused to resign and pledged to provide all the funding Britain needs to get through Brexit.

The Chancellor said: ‘ We have already spent £500million, and we will be making available more resources in the Budget.’

He will deliver his Budget on November 22 and said he was ready to use the Government’s contingency reserve, its emergency fund of up to £2billion, if necessary.

His tone was dramatically different from earlier in the week when he appeared before the Treasury Select Committee and said the Government would not spend taxpayers’ money preparing for the possibility of a ‘no-deal’ Brexit until the ‘very last moment’.

He said he would not take money from budgets for other areas such as health or education just to ‘send a message’ to the EU. This prompted former Tory Chancellor Lord Lawson to say his behaviour was ‘very close to sabotage’.

Yesterday, asked directly if he would resign, the Chancellor said: ‘ No.’ Mr Hammond said the Brexit negotiations have created economic uncertainty but the underlying economy ‘ remains robust’ and he was ‘committed to delivering a Brexit deal that works for Britain and for jobs, business and prosperity’.

And he said that once the uncertainty over the negotiations has gone away he expects the economy to ‘start powering forward and to reach its full potential’.

‘Clearly feeling the pressure’

TRY as I might, I cannot find any reference to Shakespeare here. I imagine that many Europeans who don’t even speak a word of English would probably put him in the top ten of European cultural giants, but our greatest playwright hasn’t made the grade.

Still, at least there is a bit of Lego on display.

Similarly, you might expect the inventors of the railway, the jet engine, television, football, rugby and penicillin — British achievements, but European ones, too — to get some credit in a museum of European history.

Not so. Perhaps I am being thick, but after five hours, I am still looking. Never mind. There is an exhibit explaining that a Norwegian invented the paperclip and another telling how Hungary’s Josef Biro invented the ballpoint pen.

You do not have to be a flag-waving patriot to wonder how they managed to come up with some of this rubbish.

Now Britain has voted to leave the EU, perhaps we should not be so surprised to find that we play a pretty peripheral part in Europe’s rewriting of the European story here in the heart of Brussels.

One nation, however, is furious about the way the past is being portrayed in the European Parliament’s newlyopened ‘House of European History’.

This week, Poland’s culture minister made a complaint to the president of the European Parliament. He said the museum glosses over Germany’s wartime past while disgracefully pointing an accusing finger at Poland for being ‘complicit in the Holocaust’. ‘This exhibition violates fundamental historical truth in matters of fundamental importance,’ said Piotr Glinski.

AGRAvE charge, particularly as the museum has been the pet project of a German ex-president of the European Parliament. It is certainly not hard to see German fingerprints all over a monstrously expensive and shamelessly self- serving exercise in revisionist propaganda.

Indeed, if this museum is indicative of the way the rest of Europe sees Britain and itself, no one can be remotely surprised that the UK has decided to go its own way.

Britain does get credited with importing the pyjama from Asia and with being the first European nation to abolish the slave trade. There is also a ‘vote Leave’ T-shirt in a display case alongside a roll of ‘vote In’ stickers, and a brief explanation that UK voters ‘no longer believed in the promise of prosperity and security within the European Union’.

But Britain’s role in freeing Europe from tyranny in the last century is brushed aside. There are several photos of bomb damage during the Blitz, along with other destruction all over mainland Europe. But key moments such as Dunkirk and D-Day — surely a central part of the European story — are barely mentioned.

I did find one reference to D-Day, but none to the Battle of Britain. No mention, either, of our Commonwealth allies, who shed so much blood across this continent. Sorry, Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the rest. If you are acknowledged in here somewhere, I couldn’t find you.

Winston Churchill pops up, unnamed, in a photo of the 1945 Yalta summit as he sits alongside U.S. president Franklin D. Roosevelt and Russia’s Joseph Stalin as they decide the post-war shape of Europe. There is also a Union flag with those of the U.S. and U.S.S.R.

But the central narrative is that Europe entered the 20th century as a largely innocent collection of nation states, many of them recent and artificial creations.

After World War I— a catastrophe in which, apparently, all were equally to blame — these poor Europeans found themselves caught between two terrifying ideologies which were not their fault: Nazism and Stalinism.

Europe was then flattened and endured appalling suffering — thanks to the ‘Nazis’ and ‘ Soviets’, rather than ‘Germany’ and ‘Russia’.

Europe was not liberated, as history has taught us. In the words of the museum audio guide, it was ‘disempowered’ and ‘divided’ between the U.S. and the Soviet Union.

It is only thanks to the emergence of the EU that peace and prosperity have occurred and endured. That’s the 20th century in an EU nutshell.

The Poles are furious because the suffering of Germany is equated with their own misfortune.

Photos of German refugees sit alongside those of Polish refugees. One display highlights the words of the Polish communist leader, Wladyslaw Gomulka, in 1945: ‘We must expel them (the Germans).’

Yet there is a more impor- tant question. Why has nearly £ 50 million of taxpayers’ money — much of it British — been spent on a vanity project with one clear over-arching message: that the EU is superior to the nation state?

It was ten years ago that Germany’s Hans-Gert Pottering came up with the idea of a museum to show ‘how Europe’s history shapes us all’.

No matter that the European Parliament has another multimillion-euro museum around the corner which has been doing just that for several years (and which, incidentally, claims without a shred of evidence that our Queen is ‘explicitly pro-European’).

Of course, Europe can never have too many exhibitions telling Europeans how lucky they are to live in the EU super-state.

As for the British, if we have grounds for a complaint — and right now, our Government ministers have more to occupy them in Brussels than the contents of a new museum — it is lack of recognition rather than malice or misrepresentation.

We are shown as bit-players on the fringes. No doubt sour-faced Remainers such as Nick Clegg and Lord Mandelson would argue that is all that we deserve after our historic vote to push off.

But Britons will, no doubt, be liable for a share of the running costs for years to come as part of our Brexit divorce bill. So for now, at least, this is