How Europe became the funeral pyre for Tory leaders
Europe has dominated Theresa May’s premiership and could derail it. But as Sean O’Grady explains, she is following in a long Conservative tradition
Could Europe be enough to wreck yet another Tory premiership?
As Theresa May faces a vote of no confidence in her leadership from her own MPs, and in her government from internal dissidents and opposition parties, it may be scant comfort that she would hardly be the first Conservative leader to see their dreams and ambitions destroyed by a subject – Europe – that is seemingly incapable of resolution.
Indeed, May, punningly enough, exists as a sort of political mayflower – her lifespan in office, be it long or short, devoted to one purpose only: Brexit. All the stuff about “burning injustices”, the high-minded schemes to reinvigorate the British economy with an “industrial strategy” – her own mild brand of corporatism – or the plight of the “just about managing” families has been subsumed by the question of Britain’s EU withdrawal.
To use a modern phrase, her administration has not the “bandwidth” to deal with everything else as well as sort out Brexit; in truth it doesn’t really have the capacity or the intellectual clout to deal with Brexit itself.
In order to break the blackmailing hold of her band of Eurosceptic fundamentalists – and, to be fair, the truculent resistance of the Europhiles – she sought her own mandate at the general election of 2017. In an inexplicably long campaign the British electorate did what they usually do when asked a question by a prime mister – they chose to answer a different one. Called upon to back her with the kind of resounding support that would give her the oomph needed to carry out her Lancaster House hardish Brexit plan, the British electorate instead decided to blow a large raspberry and vote in unthinkable numbers for Jeremy Corbyn.
“Nothing has changed,” she foolishly said during yet another campaign cock-up. In reality everything changed when she lost her majority, her moral authority and her political autonomy. Ironically, from that moment on she was the captive of every voluble faction or personality persuaded they could do a better job than she could – and there was no shortage of those. It was quietly said that she wouldn’t lead her party into another general election, even after she had jettisoned her closest aides and handed a veto over her cabinet-making to the 1922 Committee. She indicated that she had got her party and the country into his mess – and would get them out of it. It might have been better all round if they’d just ditched her then; but, as usual, her enemies were willing to wound but not to kill. (My apologies if that language seems too violently intemperate for our times)
Those who refuse to contemplate consulting the British people would in my view make more likely our eventual exit
The outcome of the British general election of 2017 was, then, not the triumph of May and the Leavers, but the revenge of the Remainers. It has left its mark. Now May is chained to the radiator of the Democratic Unionist Party, whose illogical and inconsistent demands could only be carried out by means of divine intervention.
Sad, as they say, but true and hardly unpredictable. We remember all too well how David Cameron almost casually tossed away his place in history – which might otherwise have been relatively distinguished – with a pledge to hold an in/out EU referendum. On 23 January 2013 – a day that should live in infamy – at a speech at the Bloomberg HQ in London, Cameron explained his rationale. To be fair, he had some good points to make:
“Those who refuse to contemplate consulting the British people would in my view make more likely our eventual exit.
“Simply asking the British people to carry on accepting a European settlement over which they have had little choice is a path to ensuring that when the question is finally put – and at some stage it will have to be – it is much more likely that the British people will reject the EU.
“That is why I am in favour of a referendum. I believe in confronting this issue – shaping it, leading the debate. Not simply hoping a difficult situation will go away.”
He summarised Europe’s agenda thus:
“First, the problems in the eurozone are driving fundamental change in Europe.
"Second, there is a crisis of European competitiveness, as other nations across the world soar ahead. And third, there is a gap between the EU and its citizens which has grown dramatically in recent years, and which represents a lack of democratic accountability and consent that is – yes – felt particularly acutely in Britain.”
By the way, and as if to prove the sure touch, if not genius, for politics possessed by Tony Blair, the reaction of the ex-prime minister at the time to Cameron’s move is chillingly and amusingly prophetic:
“It reminds me a bit of the Mel Brooks comedy Blazing Saddles where the sheriff, at one point during it, holds a gun to his own head and says: ‘If you don’t do what I want I’ll blow my brains out.’ – you want to watch that one of the 26 [other EU members, now 27] don’t say just go ahead.”
In the early 2010s, as the coalition cut its way to dismal poll ratings Cameron was, in truth, spooked by the rise of Nigel Farage and Ukip, capitalising on a widespread but inchoate set of grievances in post-financial crisis, post-austerity, “left-behind” Britain.
Cameron feared being outflanked by them on the right, splitting the traditional Conservative vote and losing seats to Ed Miliband’s Labour Party. In a way his strategy succeeded – but too well. At the 2015 election, with the collapse in the Liberal Democrat vote, Labour’s rout in Scotland at the hands of the SNP and some recession in Ukip’s charge, very possibly because of Cameron’s referendum pledge, Cameron and his campaign manager George Osborne succeeded so far as to win an overall majority – the first Tory one since 1992. Instead of another round of coalition, with an even stronger Tory domination, they could steer their own course. Instead of being able to plead that “Nick Clegg won’t let me hold the referendum”, Cameron was forced to do so.
Or was he? Back in 2015 and 2016 no one was much bothered. Europe hardly featured in the voters’ list of concerns, although immigration often did. Cameron might have got away with forgetting his promise (as he had before on a “cast-iron” one to hold a plebiscite on the Lisbon Treaty of 2009).
In any event, Cameron was complacent and, like many, too mesmerised by the precedent of the 1975 vote, when the people tended to “follow the faces they trusted”, as the arch-Europhile Roy Jenkins remarked.
Cameron failed to see how times had changed, and how folk were more sceptical about “the establishment”, whipped up by Ukip. Cameron also refused to countenance “blue-on-blue” debates, which allowed Boris Johnson and Michael Gove to parade unchallenged directly by their Tory peers; the Treasury’s “Project Fear”, by contrast, seemed implausible to many of the public.
You can think of ex-ministers who are going around causing all sorts of trouble. We don’t want another three more of the bastards out there...
So Cameron lost. He lost his party and his premiership, and he is now routinely relegated to the bottom of the historical premier premiership table, along with Sir Anthony Eden (Suez) and Neville Chamberlain (Munich), in their own ways also guilty of serious delusions about foreign policy. Maybe the memoir Cameron is composing in his £25,000 “shepherd’s cottage” will succeed in rehabilitating him.
Before Cameron there was John Major. Like May today, Major faced a huge series of battles to get a European agreement through parliament: the Maastricht Treaty strengthened European integration, but also contained a series of British “opt-outs”, the most valuable being the right to keep the pound and avoid joining the ill-starred euro.
Like May today as well, he had no overall majority for much of his time in parliament and a well-organised group of Eurosceptics tormenting him. Some crucial votes he only won with the support of the 20 or so Liberal Democrats, then led by Paddy Ashdown, prepared to put country before party; Labour was uniformly hostile to Major’s legislation, though agreeing with almost everything in it.
Major, like May, had a gang of leaky Eurosceptics in cabinet permanently causing trouble. In an unguarded moment in front of a live mic, he let slip his true feelings:
“Just think it through from my perspective. You are the prime minister, with a majority of 18, a party that is still harking back to a golden age that never was, and is now invented. You have three right-wing members of the cabinet who actually resign. What happens in the parliamentary party?
“I could bring in other people. But where do you think most of this poison is coming from? From the dispossessed and the never-possessed. You can think of ex-ministers who are going around causing all sorts of trouble.
“We don’t want another three more of the bastards out there. What’s Lyndon Johnson’s maxim?...”
May must feel the same way about today’s “gang of five”, the “pizza club” of Leadsom, Gove, Fox, Grayling and Mordaunt. And, indeed, about Michael Howard, Peter Lilley and John Redwood, still banging the same drum as they did in Major’s cabinet a quarter century ago. (At least Michael Portillo has gone off to play with trains and model garishly coloured blazers.)
Major survived his own leadership crisis over Europe, one he felt he had to end himself by, shockingly, resigning his position as party leader (but not prime minister) and inviting his enemies to “put up or shut up”. John Redwood, the Welsh secretary, did so and scored respectably, but ultimately lost. So Major carried on, his authority scarcely enhanced before he was slaughtered by Blair in 1997. It was the Tories’ worst thrashing since 1832. As he himself said within weeks, it was time to “leave the stage”.
When Major claimed that his foes were “still harking back to a golden age that never was, and is now invented”, it was plainly a reference to the Thatcher premiership – which remains to this day a golden age for the right of the Conservative Party and their fellow travellers in Ukip – the likes of Arron Banks and Farage explicitly declaring their devotion to her.
In many ways the Leave campaign was a movement that sought to bring back Thatcherism, the EU being regarded as a pettifogging, bureaucratic, even socialist barrier to the return of free enterprise, low tax and the small-state policies of the 1980s. It was, if you will, a campaign for Mrs Thatcher’s fourth term in office, the one she never got to deliver.
The allegiance to Thatcher was, however, of the late-vintage Thatcher – the one who, when she reached the Lords, was happy to vote against her own party on Maastricht; the one who made the landmark Bruges speech in 1988, a sort of Old Testament for Eurosceptics. A brief extract gives its flavour:
Mr Delors said he wanted the European parliament to be the democratic body of the [European] Community, the commission to be the executive and the Council of Ministers to be the senate. No. No. No.
“We have not successfully rolled back the frontiers of the state in Britain only to see them reimposed at a European level with a European super-state exercising a new dominance from Brussels.
“Certainly we want to see Europe more united and with a greater sense of common purpose.
“But it must be in a way which preserves the different traditions, parliamentary powers and sense of national pride in one’s own country; for these have been the source of Europe’s vitality through the centuries.”
Pure prototype Ukip, you might say. Yet she also declared in that same address, less comfortably for the likes of Jacob Rees-Mogg and Farage:
“The lesson of the economic history of Europe in the Seventies and Eighties is that central planning and detailed control do not work and that personal endeavour and initiative do; that a state-controlled economy is a recipe for low growth and that free enterprise within a framework of law brings better results.
“The aim of a Europe open to enterprise is the moving force behind the creation of the single European market in 1992. By getting rid of barriers, by making it possible for companies to operate on a European scale, we can best compete with the United States, Japan and other new economic powers emerging in Asia and elsewhere.”
Margaret Thatcher, the longest serving peacetime premier of the 20th century, left office on 22 November 1990. She did so for four manifest reasons. First, what was called “style” – an increasingly imperious manner. Second, a deepening economic recession. Third, the poll tax, which was incredibly unpopular and became a direct threat to Tory MPs’ chances of holding on to their seats. But there was also the question of Europe.
At that juncture the primary topic of debate was whether the UK should join the European exchange rate mechanism (ERM), a possible precursor to the single currency – much the same issue that was later to derail Major’s premiership and which provided a focus for the rivalry between Blair and Brown under New Labour. At the time the Conservative Party had many more European true believers at its head than today; and when the then-leader of the Commons, Sir Geoffrey Howe, resigned in protest at the prime minister’s dismissive approach to Europe, she was fatally damaged. Her words at prime minister’s questions were the final straw for Howe, Michael Heseltine and the other Europhiles, and they echo down the years:
“Yes, the [European] Commission does want to increase its powers. Yes, it is a non-elected body and I do not want the commission to increase its powers at the expense of the House, so of course we are differing. Of course…
“The president of the commission, Mr Delors, said at a press conference the other day that he wanted the European parliament to be the democratic body of the [European] Community, he wanted the commission to be the executive and he wanted the Council of Ministers to be the senate. No. No. No.”
Three weeks later she had had to quit, but not until she had had time to refuse a request from the Labour leader, Neil Kinnock, to hold a general election so the British people could make their own choice about her successor. Plus ça change.
The trouble for the Tories over Europe goes further back still. Britain’s first, belated attempt to join the then European Economic Community (EEC) was rejected after a few years of negotiations in 1963 – because of a French veto. After President Charles de Gaulle said “non” to the UK, the fortunes of the Conservative movement declined markedly.
The prime minister responsible for the bid, Harold Macmillan, saw it as the great strategic purpose of his administration: the way to find a role in the world as the British empire was being dismantled, and a way to boost the UK’s sluggish growth by joining in with the fastest growing economic bloc (apart from Japan) at the time. Macmillan, in the end, failed and his government was defeated by Labour in 1964.
In fact the only Tory leader to remotely prosper from Europe was Ted Heath, who was Macmillan’s chief negotiator – the reverse of a Brexit secretary – and went on to be the Tory PM who took the UK in to the EEC in 1973.
Even there, though, the effort left some bad feelings among the small band of Tory proto-Eurosepctics, led by Enoch Powell, a man in love with parliament and fixated by sovereignty. More concerned with immigration, his hatred of the EEC was visceral, and his advice to Tory voters in marginal seats in the West Midlands in the 1974 election to vote Labour – because they were offering a referendum on staying in the EEC – was pivotal in pushing Heath out of No 10. So, in his way, even Heath was a victim of his party’s troubled and ambiguous relationship to the European issue.
So there they are then: Macmillan, Heath, Thatcher, Cameron, May. Europe has haunted the Tories for almost seven decades, ever since Winston Churchill, Anthony Eden and Harold Macmillan politely said “no” to an invitation to join attempts to create a European Community in the 1950s.
Wrangling about Europe also badly distracted the Tories in opposition under William Hague and Iain Duncan Smith. The floor is littered with other political corpses and zombie policies (remember Hague’s “Save the Pound”?). Ken Clarke and Michael Heseltine never became leader of their party because they were too pro-European. Others, such as Johnson and Gove, have found their anti-European crusading not quite sufficient to carry them into No 10, mainly because most of the parliamentary party remained relatively relaxed about the EU – epitomised by, say, Amber Rudd and Philip Hammond, as well as Cameron and Osborne.
Further back in the mists of history, all the way back to the mid-19th century, we find the Conservatives split about protectionism and “imperial preference” as against global free trade. The issue came back time and again to mither Tory statesmen from Robert Peel to Stanley Baldwin. Only the Second World War forced them to take their minds off trade policy.
The last Tory leader to talk much sense about Europe was in fact the Mark I David Cameron, the one who in 2006 told his party simply to “stop banging on about Europe”.
Whatever happened to that idea?
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