Flying Free (25 page)

At this point, the EU appeared to concede. The Czech and Irish referendums were cancelled and those declared in Portugal, Poland, Denmark and the UK indefinitely postponed.

And now they started playing dirty.

In December 2005, Britain’s six months’ tenure of the EU’s rotating presidency came to an end and Blair came to the parliament.

I confess that, when he had come six months earlier, I had been impressed. The parliament did not like Blair. He had stuck with America in his (not demonstrably Britain’s) venture in Iraq without first asking the permission of the EU. Britain still remained outside the Eurozone. Blair was a heretic. Some day soon, he could be branded a criminal for such disgraceful autonomous behaviour. At present, he was just an unpopular dissenter.

He was brilliant. He sold himself as an ardent pro-European. We must encourage the people of Europe, he said. We must speak their language and not become entirely alienated from them. Under Britain’s presidency, the EU would get rid of unnecessary regulations and reform the Common Agricultural Policy…

Much to Blair’s surprise, no doubt, I did not subject him to the habitual Farage barrage. If, I said, he was successful in deregulating the economy and in translating its words and actions to the people, I for one would support him.

Even members of the group later accused me of treason, but I not only meant every word – had Blair indeed succeeded, I would have shaken his hand – but I knew that he was destined to fail and to fail ignominiously. Every least alteration to parliamentary protocols requires unanimity, and the prospect of unanimity was nil.

I was still impressed by Blair at a lunch later in his presidency. Here was a man who could think on his feet. He nursed a single glass of wine throughout, though the carafe remained in front of him. In the end, I became fed up with such ‘bogarting’ and had to ask, ‘Pass the wine, please, Prime Minister.’

He looked mildly surprised, but he passed it.

At the end of the presidency in December, Blair returned to the parliament to report. For once, seating was ad hoc rather than hierarchical. The UKIP members behaved like stereotypical Germans with
beach-towels
. We rushed into the chamber so soon as the doors opened and occupied all of the second row. Godfrey Bloom wore a deerstalker and carried a meerschaum. When asked why, he explained that he was looking for the French concession.

None of Blair’s declared intentions had been fulfilled. He was haggard and ashen. The sparkle in his eye had faded and sunk back like a lately brilliant fish thrown back dead into the ocean in accordance with Common Fisheries Policy. He had been up for most of the night, arguing with Chirac, attempting to salvage something – anything – from the presidency. He was no longer impressive.

Now I let him have it. I pointed out that, so far from reducing regulation, he had overseen the passing of a further 3,350 legislative acts, that there had been no sign of economic reform, that he had pledged that there would be no surrender of the British rebate but that he had signed away £7 billion of it and that, so far from reforming the CAP, he had extracted a tentative commitment that the EU would review spending on agriculture in three years’ time.

‘Why should British taxpayers pay for new sewers in Budapest and a new underground system in Warsaw,’ I demanded, ‘when our own public services are crumbling in London? …Your budget deal is game, set and match to President Chirac. No cheese-eating surrender-monkey he. Unlike you, he stands up for French national interests not some bizarre notion of Europe, and he has outclassed you and outplayed you at every turn…’

Everything which happens in the hemicycle is filmed, but for some mysterious reason, the official film of Blair’s response has vanished. Those
who saw it, however, will testify that the man simply lost it. He turned crimson. He screamed. He pointed at the Union Jacks which stood on the desks before us and yelled, ‘You – you sit behind your country’s flags but you don’t represent your country’s interests. We’re in 2005, not 1945! We’re not at war with these people!’

This last reflects Blair’s greatest folly. He believes his own rhetoric about modernity. Maybe he reads history, but, if so, it is as many a tourist wanders an historic site, sincerely believing that those who built its buildings and lived amongst them were perforce savages, moved by emotions which we have somehow miraculously outgrown. When asked what his food strategy was, he merely blinked and said that ‘Britain has no food strategy’ because, of course, plagues and wars and fuel blockades and the like are things of the past.

In the modern era, there will always be beans from Kenya and
prepacked
grated Reggiano Parmesan from Italy. If Britain should run short of wheat, she can always get it from Canada or Poland. Time has stopped. We have reached a Brave New World where everyone believes in peace, justice and equality.

He does not realise that 1914 and 1939 were really quite modern in their time, and that the less educated people thought then too that they had attained the highest development of humankind. He does not realise that every man-made building, alliance and empire must crumble into its constituent parts and that preparedness, now as always, is all that we can offer in the way of guarantees of safety.

I pray with all my heart that all nations will be mutually supportive friends. I believe it slightly less than I believe in Father Christmas.

And there, I think, lies the greatest difference between us. The EU is built on wholly unwarranted faith. Architects tell us that even in the great Gothic cathedrals whose components have been carefully selected and fashioned for their functions, ‘the arch never sleeps’ – that there are constant strains pulling this way and that – and even these must one day fall.

So too an alliance such as the United States, built with the consent of all its people, can exist for centuries but will still one day founder. The European Union is a Lego construct, forced together by an impatient child
regardless of the shapes and colours of the pieces. Its components strain against one another before it has even been completed.

Blair, Barroso and the rest of them, like the child builder, see the magnificent palace in their minds’ eyes but forget that the arch never sleeps and that ill-assorted pieces will not adhere for long.

But then Blair’s contribution to modernity, his Ozymandias-style memorial and, by his own admission, the symbol of his government was a gigantic, £789 million glass-fibre fabric blister on the banks of the Thames.

The Dome’s life expectancy is sixty years. I’ll bet it outlives the European Union.

I have since flayed Gordon Brown, who sat stolidly chewing the cud and looked like an impatient preacher attempting to ignore a resonant fart in the middle of his sermon, Angela Merkel, Nicolas Sarkozy, who schmoozed all the usual Europhile suspects (Cohn-Bendit, Watson, Schulz, Daul etc.) and had them wriggling in their seats like excited puppies, but came back at me fiercely again and again and plainly enjoyed the debate because later, at the Elysée, he preferred to enjoy cigars and talk with the man who had given him hell – now there’s a politician for you – than with the more deferential. Sarkozy likes a cigar and respects an enemy.

None of them ever lost his or her cool like Blair.

After its defeat at the hands of the people, the Commission had declared that a period of reflection was needed. A ‘group of wise men’, soon to be known as the ‘Amato Group’ after its leader, former Italian Prime Minister Giuliano Amato, spent really quite a long time preparing an alternative text.

Which was, ingeniously, precisely the same.

There were the same number of new competencies, the same number of powers of veto withdrawn. The all-important difference lay, as Amato pointed out, in the title, which they changed from the ‘Treaty Establishing a Constitution for Europe’ into the far racier ‘Treaty of Lisbon’.

‘The good thing about calling it a treaty’, said Amato with relish, ‘is that we don’t need referendums.’

OK. It wasn’t precisely the same. They got rid of the preamble, which had always been incomprehensible and superfluous drivel, and the official anthem and flag, though these have, needless to say, returned without constitutional authority.

They performed a lot of tricks by referring to previous treaties and sort of incidentally giving their provisions force of law rather than bothering to spell them out here. All that the leaders of member-states had had to read when they signed the eventual treaty was a hotch-potch of amendments which required referring back to the previous documents referred to. The European Council forbade the consolidation of all these clauses, though this had been unanimously requested by MEPs, until the treaty was safely signed. There was therefore no parliamentary scrutiny.

And that was it.

What had been Part I of the Constitution, with nine parts, now became Titles I–IX. Then there is a Title X, and Part IV of the Constitution is here rendered as Title XI. The European Council forbade the consolidation of the countless amendments into one comprehensible document, though this had been unanimously requested by MEPs, so none of us could actually read it.

This was cheating.

Forgive me if I here become a trifle fanciful, but governments perform, I suppose, much the same role as parents. The children are too busy playing and learning to worry about exactly how there are meals on the table or money in the bank, so they entrust to their parents a deal of power and the freedom of the family’s assets. They trust to natural benevolence and mutual interest.

Of course, the amount of power claimed by parents and granted by children varies widely with different cultures and ages. We no longer accept arranged marriages in the West – though, provided that there be benevolence and insight on the part of the parents and the bride and groom have power of veto, parents may be better judges than the young in the throes of oestrus. Where there is no such benevolence and the parents are greedy for themselves, they claim licence to prostitute their own child.

That is what the Europhiliac politicians have done with their trusting daughter Europa. They made a secret deal with the old bull for her violation in exchange for gold and power.

They did it first by straight subterfuge. They groomed us, booked us into a double room with him – well, he’s a nice, harmless old chap, he’s loaded and you’re sure to come out of it with a pretty present, dear, and two rooms are much more expensive…

We got pawed and slobbered over and very badly screwed. And it was our parents, not we, who were driving around in a flash new car.

We sulked. We wanted to play the field, to party, but still we believed that our parents must have our best interests at heart. They kept taking us off to stay with the old pervert and hiring us out to accompany him to social engagements. They gave him the care of our jewellery and other inherited property. At last, when they thought that we were too beaten down to resist further, they sent out the wedding invitations.

We arrived at the altar. We did our best to be dutiful, but took one look at the drooling brute and ran for our lives.

So they arranged a new wedding. They soothed us. They loved us, didn’t they? And, to prove it, they had found this dashing young fellow who would still allow us to associate with whomsoever we would.

He had a different name. He wore a bright new coat. They did not allow us to see his face until we reached the altar-rails. And at the very moment that we saw that glazed eye, the telltale dribbling from the dewlaps, the church-doors slammed shut behind us.

When Jeffrey Titford and I had first entered the EU Parliament, we resolved that we would behave – at least in the chamber – like English gentlemen, and comport and disport ourselves with courtesy and propriety.

Up till now, I had kept that pledge and had abided by the rules, however I despised the principles of those imposing them. Now the power-hungry eurocrats had broken their own rules and, whilst deriving wealth and power from them, were cheating the people of their right to democratic rule.

The gloves were off.

As the Commissioners tutted and the ushers manhandled me over the next months, I wanted to shout at them, ‘Don’t you get it? That is how it works,
you bloody fools! Deny people a voice and the power to work change and first they become irresponsible and idle because they are reduced to impotence, then they start to hit out and to scream. And they are right to do so!’

Whilst the Amato group was deliberating as to the exact font which should be used in the new edition, the correct spelling of ‘Lisbon’ and other matters of similar importance, Roger Knapman’s term of office ended and I stepped with remarkably little argument and tentative enthusiasm into the leadership. My enthusiasm was for the battle ahead which promised – and proved – to be more passionate, public, time-consuming and exacting than any in which we had thus far engaged.

The tentativeness? Well, I was still apprehensive about doing anything quite so grown-up, but we had a good team to assist in the admin, Roger had left a party with a large, well-organised and largely unified membership and I was confident that I could get on with the front-of-house stuff so necessary at present without too many kitchen fires.

On 12 December 2007, the day before the treaty was to be signed in Lisbon, the rowdyism started. As Felipe Gonzáles, the Spanish Prime Minister, entered the hemicycle to the usual sycophantic applause, eighty of us from across the ideological spectrum arose with placards and banners bearing just one word: ‘REFERENDUM.’ We chanted just one word: ‘REFERENDUM.’

Over and over again we shouted it whilst totalitarian MEPs tutted and sneered and officials sent ushers scurrying uncertainly about the chamber to contain us, to confiscate banners and to prevent cameras from recording the event. We were scattered about the chamber, which made it hard for them. REFERENDUM! REFERENDUM! REFERENDUM!

Gonzales tried to speak, but again and again had to stop. Ushers gathered up banners only to hear another outcry elsewhere and to rush off again. It went on and on. REFERENDUM! REFERENDUM! REFERENDUM!