The UK can never rejoin the EU until English voters accept where they really belong

In Vilnius in 1990, the Lithuanian prime minister quizzed me again and again why the British had kicked out Thatcher. Europe has always blighted our politicians’ careers – but not necessarily for the reasons you might think

The 27 European leaders gathered in Brussels on Wednesday for a crucial European Union summit, with Theresa May seeking a compromise to save the Brexit deal (AFP/Getty)

On 22 November 1990, I was in a battered old taxi in Vilnius, going to interview the prime minister of Lithuania. The revolutionary wave that had swept central and eastern Europe was now lapping at the Soviet Union, and the Baltic state of Lithuania had made the first moves to break away.

There was a sharp dissonance between the defiant national spirit of this Baltic capital and the deprivation and dilapidation all around. The USSR, though no one knew it, had only just over a year left to live.

But that’s not why I remember that day or that hour. It is because, as the driver stopped at a red light, the radio announced a newsflash: the British prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, had resigned. To many in the region, Thatcher was a hero, and to Lithuania’s prime minister, Kazimira Prunskiene, too.

When I shook her hand, she asked me bluntly, “What have you done?” For the best part of an hour, the interview was turned on its head and she quizzed me: how had this happened, what were the British thinking of, why, why and why? And the answers – stripping out all the detail of party politics and procedures – boiled down to one: the British – I would rather say English – ambivalence, even hostility in some quarters, towards “Europe”.

Nearly 30 years on, something of that ambivalence can be discerned in the countries of “new Europe”, where the craving to belong and be protected by the European Union vies with the assertion of reborn statehood. But the question I was asked all those years ago in Vilnius – and echoed by millions around the world – still stands: why?

What is it about the UK and its relations to Europe that has now blighted or ended the careers of every Conservative prime minister, all the way from Edward Heath to Theresa May? And will our Europe complex finally be resolved when May, or her successor, manages – in the wooden language of bureaucracy – to “deliver” Brexit?

Now, of course, it is not entirely true that it was the Europe question alone that brought down these leaders. With Heath there was industrial unrest; with Thatcher there was the poll tax and her growing remoteness from the people. Nor is it a malady that affects only Conservatives. Tony Blair judged it too risky politically to sign up to the euro, despite his first huge electoral mandate, and Labour is hardly united about Europe today. “Europe” is a national, as well as a Tory, affliction. So why?

Here are just a few possible reasons. One is the war. The UK’s experience of the Second World War was different from that of most of continental Europe. With the exception of the Channel Islands, there was no invasion and no occupation, and we emerged on the winning side. What is now the European Union sprang from the urgent desire of the French and the Germans to prevent another European war. To this day, there is an acceptance – even in France – that peace is worth a small diminution of national sovereignty. That is less true in the UK – even though our Nato membership entails as great a sacrifice of sovereignty.

Two: it is not just the experience of war and vulnerability that separates most of continental Europe from the UK; it is at least as much the myth that we have constructed since – and which persists in school syllabuses today. Where continental pupils learn of the ravages of war, Nazi and fascist crimes, and the benefits of cooperation in preserving peace, British children by and large are fed tales of derring-do and how a great and righteous land stood alone and prevailed against the odds. Truly, history is written by the victors – and woven into a unifying myth. It is only recently, and hesitantly, that some of the downsides – the casualties, the bombed-out cities, the black market and the rest – are being exposed to the light.

Three: the empire is harnessed to this national myth, fostering the illusion that the UK is, or can again be, a global power. I am not convinced that imperial nostalgia was a big factor in the Brexit vote; many voted Leave for the opposite reason: in the hope of keeping the UK out of foreign wars. Either way, a popular distinction is often assumed between “our” empire – benevolent and peacefully dismantled – and the exploitative empires of others that were deservedly lost. It is a distinction that separates us from Europe, and lives on in continuing rivalry with the French.

Four: our geography, as an island, or rather islands, sets us psychologically apart from the people of continental Europe. We fancy that we look outward, and not just east but west, and can largely thrive alone. Our natural ally in this reckoning, if we need one, is the United States, our one-time colony, rather than the polyglot confusion of Europe. This was part of De Gaulle’s rationale for vetoing Britain’s membership of the then Common Market. He may well have been right.

Geography also helps explain our non-understanding of land borders, specifically the Irish border. The problem is compounded by the fact that successive Westminster governments still cannot quite accept the Republic of Ireland as a fully sovereign country – a blind spot that has dogged the Brexit negotiations. The UK seems affronted that Ireland has stood firmly with the EU, and vice versa. But, as Brussels spokespeople say: why would the EU favour a country that is leaving over one that is remaining?

Last, but not least, is our party and electoral system. Even though popular support for a right-wing nationalist party was probably akin to the current level of support for the AfD in Germany, it was long disguised. The “broad church” of the Conservative Party accommodated a nationalist wing that only partially decamped to Ukip. Then the fact that smaller parties, including Ukip, even in its heyday, are barely represented in the UK parliament, chiefly because of the first-past-the-post system, has to be a travesty of democracy. It may also help to explain why the referendum forecasts were largely wrong.

And it is in the democratic system that one of the mooted ways out of the great UK Brexit muddle might be sought. One suggestion – along with a Final Say vote – has been for a government of national unity that could garner the support of sufficient MPs to see something like the prime minister’s current “soft-ish” Brexit “over the line”. But something more than an ad hoc solution is needed. A government of national unity would make greater sense if it led to a wholesale remaking of the party mould. Theresa May’s ill-fated election last year should have been fought on Brexit. But it wasn’t, because both major parties were, and remain, split on Europe.

Given that the UK’s relationship with the EU – in, out, in between – has long been the deepest divide in our domestic politics, that choice should be reflected in party politics. That it isn’t – still – leaves a big gap in the national political debate, which is now filled, not for the first time, by the Conservative Party’s civil war.

The quarrel goes way beyond the Conservatives, however. Nor is it, as some would have it, mainly generational. It might just be that, as old Leavers die and more young Remainers qualify to vote, the result of a new referendum would be different.

But demographics are a dangerous game. Many of the same people who endorsed the UK’s accession to the then European Community in 1975 voted to leave in 2016. Today’s Remainers could well become tomorrow’s Leavers.

If the UK eventually comes to decide that it wants to remain in, or rejoin, the EU, it will not be because a younger generation has kept its faith with Europe. It will be because enough English voters have put the war and the empire and their island mentality behind them, and finally come to accept where they belong.