The Euro zealot whose world has imploded
JOHN Kerr is the authentic, drawling voice of the European elite. Whitehall insider, British ambassador, Shell deputy chairman, peer of the realm – he has been these and more, outwardly droll, bookishly pleased with himself. Kerr is clever and courtly in his ways. But with his tobaccoey timbre he is zealotry cloaked in velvet.
He is also, at present, smoulderingly angry about the Brexit vote. For decades he had been a leading proponent of the European superstate.
He was ambassador to the EU and helped to write the EU constitution (including Article 50, its exit route). He is now having to watch the whole caboodle run smack into a wall. The poor fellow’s cosy little world has imploded.
Kerr’s outburst about immigration and how the ‘bloody stupid’ British native population needs its intelligence topped up by foreigners, is both rephrensible and foolish. It is troubling in its echoes of eugenics and in its blatant contempt for the people of this country. That ‘bloody stupid’ peasantry can see how out of touch the unelected snoots of the House of Lords have become.
His disregard for the great unwashed of the electorate is widely shared in the Upper House. They regard democracy as a tiresome business at best. Days after the EU referendum, Kerr made a speech in the Lords in which he said that ‘student politics may have trashed the country but now it is time for the grown-ups to reassert themselves’. By ‘grown-ups’ he meant pro-EU members of the Establishment. When Kerr speaks of elected politicians, the disdain is tangible.
His comments in the Chamber that day drew hear-hears and nods of approval from the Labour and Lib Dem benches. Kerr, 74, son of a Glasgow doctor, was educated at Oxford University. His long career in the diplomatic service saw him fast-streamed to numerous overseas postings including Moscow, Pakistan and Washington DC, where he was head of Chancery (ie the intelligence bit) and later ambassador in the Clinton years. Hillary Clinton’s defeat in the US presidential election may only have added to Kerr’s sense of dizzying impotence.
In the early 19 0s he had a stint at the Treasury, working as aide to Chancellor Geoffrey Howe. Was it Howe, the pro-European who brought down Margaret Thatcher, who persuaded Kerr that the European project was so wonderful? Or does his support for Brussels flow from a more self-interested attachment to the bureaucratic machinery that has served him so lucratively in his career? Kerr’s post-retirement position at Shell, along with directorships at Scottish Power, Rio Tinto, Scottish American Investments and elsewhere, have made him a man of means.
Sir John Major, in his memoirs, let slip his opinion of Kerr (who had guided the naïve Major through the Maastricht Treaty maelstrom). ‘When Kerr comes up to you and asks the time,’ wrote Major, ‘you wonder why me and why now?’
Until yesterday he possibly retained that almost hypnotic aura of deft, connected, shrewdness. Now, I’m afraid, he just looks a clumsy racist and an obdurate obstacle to the public’s legitimate concerns about immigration and to the clearly expressed democratic will of more than 17million voters.