Flying Free (14 page)

So what you have paid for instead of debate is 3,100 specialist committees constantly buzzing in Brussels in the cause of homogeneity, resolving
sub-sections
to resolutions which, from the moment that they emerge from the Commission, cannot be challenged or rejected but only modified. 

This is consultancy heaven.

The actual parliament sits for just sixty days a year.

Should I say that again?

The actual parliament sits for just sixty days a year – twelve days in the £700 million Brussels complex and forty-eight in the £300 million Strasbourg one.

The rest of an MEP’s time is taken up with group meetings, visitor meetings (lobbying and propaganda in any other language) and all these committees. Believe it or not, there is now a Brussels Science of Commitology. The Commitologists have meetings too.

Every fourth week, an extraordinary migration takes place. MEPs and their staff pack the entire contents of their offices into tin trunks. These are transported 270 miles to Strasbourg.

Friends of mine who went to Cambridge University tell me that they used to do something very similar when they were undergraduates. As a joke, they would enter their friends’ rooms when the owners were away, take meticulous measurements then shift everything to some improbable spot – the middle of a quad, the roof of King’s chapel or the Senate House – and reconstruct the whole shooting-match there, right down to the positioning of the slippers and the replacing of boxer-shorts and porn in the drawers.

This little version of the same joke costs you €250 million a year and it serves no purpose whatever. Occasionally the reform of this absurdity is mooted, but to no avail. The French have had it written into the treaties so that they get their share of the profitable action and the status attached to being a centre of government.

Luxembourg, the administrative centre, also wanted in on the act and is the seat of several more agencies of the Union and the base for 2,000 more staff. The Luxembourg institutions included, incredibly, the parliament’s library. Books and documents are needed in a parliament, but it sort of gives you pause when you know that every book ordered costs €50,000.

When first I arrived at Strasbourg airport, I was mortified to discover that there were three channels at passport control: one for European citizens, one for all others – and one for us grandees of the European Parliament, who were swept through without question or delay.

I felt as though I had stepped back in time to the days when the nobility had their own pews in church whilst the peasantry gathered at the back. Then it was an aristocracy. Today it is the mediocracy. The scum also rises.

In the Soviet Union, party leaders had their road lanes so that they were not held up by the common herd in their annoying traffic jams. Oh, and good Lord. With Strasbourg establishing the precedent, John Prescott famously did the same thing on the M4 between London and Heathrow.

A rot spreads fast.

As we step from the airport at Strasbourg, chauffeur-driven, air-conditioned limousines sizzle softly along the kerb. These are European Parliament cars. Should we choose to fly to Baden-Baden or Stuttgart, we receive the same star-treatment. The Mayor of Strasbourg wants the EU to stay here. Ferrying self-important functionaries to and from the airport is a small price to pay for keeping the restaurants, bars and knocking-shops thriving.

This EU Parliament only cost around £300 million to build. As I wrote for the
Daily Mail
when first I arrived, ‘The impact is staggering. It looks as if my seven-year-old son has been given a kit with 14,000 tons of steel, 140,000 cubic yards of concrete and every available window-pane in France – then told to construct something silly.

‘So the building resembles the mother-ship from
Close Encounters
descending onto the gasometers next to the Oval.’

All that glass inside is meant, so they tell us, to represent ‘democracy in motion’ and the ‘transparency’ of the European Union. It sort of does. You can’t see anything through it.

When first we arrived there, the air-conditioning was not working. Glass without air-conditioning is called ‘a greenhouse’. The temperature was in the nineties. Again there were no signs and there were far, far too few lifts. Those that there were were therefore jam-packed with steaming, scowling MEPs in sweat-darkened shirts and suits which clung to their legs. Sometimes the lifts did not work but got stuck between floors.

Getting up to the right level, the right corridor in this ants’ nest colosseum was hard. Getting down again was apparently impossible.

This is a new trick which ingenious modern architects have emulated at Tate Modern. There perhaps it is intended to be a conceptual installation
referring to lost innocence. You know. The fruit cannot be untasted or reattached to the Tree of Knowledge sort of thing. Cute.

What message the same device in the EU Parliament building is intended to convey I am unsure, but, having left the ground floor, you can continue to rise or you can sink to the nether regions of the subterranean car-park, but you can never again find terra firma or the exit.

As the lift-doors opened for the fourth time on the lowest level of the underground car-park and I moaned and loosened the shirt under my armpits and once more headed upward, I was put in mind of the legend graven at the entrance to Dante’s inferno,
‘Lasciate ogni speranza, voi
ch’entrate’
– ‘Abandon all hope, you who enter here.’ Luckily, I spoke this out loud, and an Italian Europhile MP with rivulets of sweat running down his temples and dripping from his nose hastened to tell me the secret. You had to cross a bridge across the atrium to find a lift which gives access to the ground floor.

Freedom!

On the second day, the plenary session opened. The parliamentary chamber or ‘hemicycle’ is a vision in Euro-blue, a lecture-style theatre with static-free, synthetic-topped benches forming a half-wheel around the presidential bench.

My seat was number 543 of 750. I was given my all-important voting swipe-card. This allowed me, without leaving my seat, to vote on the fates of millions of Europeans of whom I knew nothing. It was also a telephone credit card which allowed me limitless calls free of charge. A useful piece of kit, all in all.

Members started to gabble in various languages. Simultaneous interpreters gabbled behind their screens. We were about to elect a new president. I was wearing my headphones which performed an admirable function but not that which they were intended to perform. They prevented me from hearing the members’ brief speeches. I could have laid my head on my forearms and had a tranquil kip for a few hours. No sound came to me at all. I felt that it was my duty to object. Technicians bustled forth. They frowned. They tinkered. They provided me with three new headsets. None of them worked.

I knew that it would make not the slightest difference to anything, but hell, I had worked hard to get here and I wanted to know what rhetorical gems were being scattered by my fellows.

I was not to receive a set of cans which actually worked until a few minutes before the vote, but no one much seemed concerned, although, in any real election, one vote might have won or lost the poll. This vote did not require my swipe-card. All the candidates were federalists, so I just scrawled ‘No confidence in any of these candidates’ on the ballot paper. There were seventy-eight other spoiled papers. Nicole Fontaine became president.

That simple.

For all that I had understood barely a word of this cursory ‘debate’, I had at least understood what I was voting – or failing to vote – for. The following day, however, we got down to the day-to-day business. Now things got seriously scary.

Look. We said from the outset that we would play no active part in the parliament’s procedures, that our function was to do what any parliament should do but this one signally fails to do – that is, to make the process accountable to voters in Britain, to monitor its machinations and expose its more glaring cases of corruption and waste. This is not transparent government, but perhaps we can poke peepholes in the cloudy screen which surrounds it.

Nonetheless, we cannot but be aware that we are now theoretically members of the ruling caste. Although our votes here will make no difference to the vast sewer of laws which will spew its contents onto distant shores, they are being passed in our names, and we would quite like to know what toxic waste we are sending home.

Every one of these thousands of amendments to directives and regulations upon which we are invited to vote may drive an honest, hardworking citizen out of business, break up a family, destroy a way of life or a life.

In Brussels, we dealt with the fine points of directives. Here the results are seen in draft agendas, soon to be followed by final draft agendas which often bear little resemblance to their antecedents. So MEPs stand up and make their ninety-second submissions to ‘debate’, heeded only by the interpreters.

Then it is voting-time, and suddenly a passion for democracy infects the entire building. If Mme Fontaine had announced that she was about to perform a nude pole-dance, the chamber could not fill more rapidly. This may have something to do with the fact that, were members not there for the vote, their daily attendance allowance would be cut by half.

In little more than an hour, before the bored gaze of a bingo-teller president, we may be required to cast 600 votes or more, each having a direct effect on the lives of hundreds, maybe millions of people.

Of course, no one has the least idea what they are voting for. The three buttons in front of me are all of the same grey and unlabelled. The big parties all obediently vote as per instructions. They have whips with huge offices, research teams and parliamentary tic-tac men who wave their arms about in order to indicate how they should vote. As in a giant Mexican wave, hundreds of hands shoot up into the air or hundreds of fingers press the same buttons.

We, at that time without a research team, had not the faintest clue what we were doing. Someone told us that the middle button was for abstainers, so we kept our fingers on the middle button.

Later on, I confessed my bafflement to some British Tories whom I met in the bar. They laughed and admitted that, despite their huge and experienced secretariat, they had only known what they were voting about on four or five occasions that day. Otherwise, well, they had been told how to vote, so they did.

After that deeply depressing morning session at which we learned that we were mere functionaries without the least autonomy, we staggered out, intent on several stiff drinks and a brisk lunch at a cafe which we had spotted within easy walking distance.

As we reached the front desk, our chauffeur materialised, shepherded us to an air-conditioned Mercedes and whisked us the few hundred yards to the cafe.

Mere functionaries? Us?

Nonsense. We were Hugely Important Persons.

And that became my life. I ran Farage Futures – though I had to employ a new man to take up the slack in my absences on duty – I continued to campaign for UKIP at home and to tell the faithful what I had learned, I skittered back and forth to Brussels and to Strasbourg. We engaged Richard North and Heather Conyngham who enabled us to make some sense of what was going on.

Oh, and I got married and we lost a leader.

I have never stood on a political stage nor posed for the media with my family. I never will. If, then, they are ever bothered by the media, it is because the media are intruding into irrelevant matters which are none of their concern.

Those are the rules and, with one notable exception, the media have respected them. If, then, I deal cursorily with personal matters, it is not because they are unimportant to me but because they matter too much to be dragged through a rough circus in which it is my perverse pleasure to perform.

So yes. In November of that year, I got married.

I had been in Frankfurt looking for execution business in 1996 when I met Kirsten Mehr, a stunning government bond broker whose brisk efficiency at first sight belied her aethereal appearance. She could have stepped into a pre-Raphaelite painting and no questions asked.

She was posted to London later that year and we furthered, as I think the expression is, our acquaintance. It was an arduous time, and she was, and has been since, fantastically supportive, not in the style of some political wives – fawning and simpering on stage, glittering at my side at receptions and all that – but supplying sanity and stability at home, managing my correspondence (particularly my email which would otherwise overwhelm me) and organising my diary.

Our lovely daughter Victoria was born the following year and her enchanting sister Isabelle five years later.

I am not uxorious, and am glad that my family has not joined me on the tightrope on which I have elected to prance and preen. They have been
my safety net, however, and have made my more daring tricks up there less daunting.

If that seems an ungallant tribute, I apologise to those who believe that emotions cannot be expressed without, at the least, an ode. Any odes which I have in me will be clumsily stammered to those who have warranted them in the privacy of home.

Maybe it was the limousines which changed Michael Holmes. Maybe he simply blundered. He certainly seemed overwrought. John Whittaker, who had been a keen supporter, found his Sunday afternoons taken up by panicky telephone calls from Holmes, demanding that he send out faxes to UKIP members about Holmes’s perceived enemies.

Holmes was unable to take a brief. It is far harder to write short than to write long, and there was much that we wanted to say. Finding ourselves limited to ninety seconds, therefore, we depended upon very careful editing to enable us to get the point across. Richard North distilled our original ideas again and again until only the quintessence remained.

Even I, though something of a natural orator (I find the words ‘garrulous gobshite’ deeply offensive and how the hell did some get back in here?) recognised this and, for all that I argued with Richard at length, accepted the necessity to take expert editing. Holmes, however, would take the arduously written draft and scribble his own version all over it, apparently wholly unaware that, for everything added, something else must be removed.