It is the fever that never breaks. The Conservatives’ European delirium has generated a thirty years’ war which has consumed the party, destroyed successive prime ministers and finally fractured the country in the Brexit referendum.
Margaret Thatcher, John Major and David Cameron were all fatally undermined by the party’s divisions over the EU. From the moment she secured the premiership after the 2016 Brexit vote, Theresa May was destined to join this list; it was only a question of timing. She has now had to promise to stand down before the next election just to secure a few extra months in the job.
Conservatism is meant to be an evolutionary ideology. Not really even an ideology, more of an attitude, perhaps best captured by the philosopher Michael Oakeshott: “To be conservative, then, is to prefer the familiar to the unknown, to prefer the tried to the untried, fact to mystery, the actual to the possible, the limited to the unbounded . . . the convenient to the perfect, present laughter to utopian bliss.”
So how then did the party of Peel, Churchill and Macmillan, the party of cautious pragmatism, succumb to such fervent ideological self-immolation over the EU? It is a mood captured well by one hardliner: “I don’t think we’ll be poorer out, but if you told me my family would have to eat grass I’d still have voted to leave.”
There was a time when the Tories were the UK’s pro-European party. It was a Conservative prime minister, Edward Heath, who led the country into the European Economic Community, as the EU was then called. Until the mid-1980s, Labour was more divided and hostile to EU membership. There was a fringe of empire Tories, led by Enoch Powell, who rejected the loss of sovereignty that flowed from British membership, but they were small in number. It was not until the late 1980s that the party began to turn against the EU.
If one is seeking a starting point for the current conflict it might be found in the fortnight in September 1988, when two speeches framed the argument that has raged ever since. The first was given by Jacques Delors, the then president of the European Commission, to the UK’s Trades Union Congress; the second by Margaret Thatcher to the College of Europe in Bruges.
Mr Delors, a brilliant administrator and political visionary, had delivered the single European market, which Mrs Thatcher supported. Now he was working towards the creation of a federal Europe. At the TUC, he signalled his dream of a “social Europe”, one that enshrined the less flexible European model of strong workers’ rights and other regulatory protections. He had also started on the path towards European monetary union.
Thatcher’s response in Bruges was characteristically blunt. She stressed her commitment to the EU, to a Europe of common purpose but one “which preserves the different traditions, parliamentary powers and sense of national pride in one’s own country”. She countered Mr Delors with the famous words: “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 superstate exercising a new dominance from Brussels.”
To secure the single market she had agreed to surrender the national veto. Now she saw majority voting being used far beyond its agreed remit to drive through social policies.
European monetary union was the issue that brought her down. She had been forced by domestic political pressure, and against all her instincts, into joining the European Exchange Rate Mechanism, but when she fought back against the next stage of currency union, pro-European MPs triggered a leadership challenge. In truth, she was already badly weakened by domestic concerns but Europe was the catalyst and in the betrayal myth that built up among her disciples, support for European integration was a mark of Cain.
This divide was also generational. The older, more paternal Tories whose views were formed by memories of war were being replaced by younger, more Atlanticist economic liberals who looked to her for their lead. But the anger at pro-Europeans in the toppling of Mrs Thatcher cannot be overstated when trying to understand the Tory civil war.
The first outbreak was opposition to Mr Major, Thatcher’s successor, when he signed the 1992 Maastricht treaty. Maastricht was a giant leap towards European federalism and most Tory leavers trace the roots of their position back to it. It renamed the European Community as the European Union, expanded majority voting and defined the path to the euro.
Ironically, it was also a negotiating triumph. Mr Major secured opt-outs both from the euro and from much European social policy. But before he had secured ratification in parliament, Britain was hit by Black Wednesday — the day the UK was forced out of the Exchange Rate Mechanism and the pound devalued. It destroyed the Tory reputation for economic management and, in the words of one minister, “Europe became synonymous with national humiliation”.
Black Wednesday supercharged the revolt against Maastricht. Like Mrs May, Mr Major faced civil war as a minority of his own MPs fought to block ratification. Myriad groupings emerged, networks of Conservative Eurosceptics all increasingly fixated on the workings of Brussels.
One early leader, Bill Cash, became so expert at the minutiae of EU law that one minister at the time observed that “if Britain was hit by a nuclear missile, Bill would emerge from the rubble clutching a copy of the EU confectionery directive and warning of the threat it posed to British sweet shops”.
Beset on all sides and with a bare majority, Mr Major even took the extraordinary step of triggering a leadership contest against himself to re-establish his authority. Though he won, it made no difference. In the election in 1997, his party was crushed at the polls.
For Iain Duncan Smith, the pro-Brexit former Conservative leader, Maastricht set a lot of Tories on the path to the exit. “I had voted to join the EU, it was almost my first ever vote. I genuinely thought and think of myself as British but European, but after Maastricht passed . . . I did begin to think we would end up parting company.” Sir Bernard Jenkin adds: “If we had not ratified it, we might have ended up staying in.”
By the mid-1990s some Tories, often former ministers such as Norman Lamont, were talking openly of the need to leave. They remained a minority but Maastricht was the moment Tories began countenancing what had seemed unthinkable.
Later, as work and pensions secretary in 2012, Mr Duncan Smith saw how majority voting and the “judicial activism” of the European Court of Justice were being used to “set the rules on welfare benefits [for migrants] in freedom of movement and we could not stop it”. He also cites the succession of European treaties from 1999 to 2007, Amsterdam, Nice and especially Lisbon, that gave more powers to the European Parliament, created a president of the council and a diplomatic service as evidence that the European project was entrenching EU power at the expense of the nation state.
After Tony Blair’s election in 1997, the Conservative party’s divisions eased. The bulk of MPs were now Eurosceptic but they united around opposition to Britain joining the euro. The new leader, William Hague, turned “saving the pound” into the party’s signature policy. It was, as one senior minister notes, “a fairly conservative position — suspicion of grands projets”.
One small lobbying group was especially effective. It was called Business for Sterling and its campaign director, then just 28, was Dominic Cummings , who would go on to mastermind the 2016 Leave campaign.
When, after 13 years out of power, David Cameron made ending the party’s obsession with Europe a key part of his mission, the Conservatives were ready to do what was necessary to win. But his position made him suspect to some in the party, so to prove his sceptic credentials, Mr Cameron committed to taking his party out of the pro-federalist European People’s party, the EU’s main conservative grouping.
At the time it must have seemed a cheap bone to throw to his anti-Europeans, but it alienated him from Angela Merkel and other European centre-right leaders. José Manuel Barroso, former president of the European Commission, sees it as a key error: “I told him, it will make your party more eccentric in Europe — eccentric in its meaning ‘off-centre’.” When, later, he came to renegotiate the UK’s membership terms ahead of the referendum, he found fewer friends around the table.
The last key factor was the rise of the UK Independence party. In 2014, it came first in the European parliamentary election, powered by anti-immigration rhetoric that blamed the EU’s policy on free movement for the rise in foreign residents. This argument would later prove the most potent weapon in the referendum campaign. Ukip terrified Tory MPs and hardliners used it to force Mr Cameron into promising the Brexit referendum to neutralise the threat.
Mr Cameron, supremely confident in his ability to win the referendum for Remain agreed, thinking also it would finally draw the poison from the party.
But his party’s Euroscepticism had hardened, with many politicians now firm Leavers. Once the vote was called they would be joined by key leaders such as Boris Johnson and Michael Gove who had been on the same journey.
One minister says: “From 1997 to 2010, no leader was making the pragmatic case for EU membership. At the same time you were seeing one constitutional treaty after another creating ever more centralisation and colleagues were saying ‘there is no stopping this’.” It is a view echoed by Mr Barroso: “You can’t bash Brussels from Monday to Friday and ask people to vote for it on Sunday.”
The aftermath of the Brexit vote deepened rather than ended division. Leading Brexiters had not expected to win and had also refused to specify the type of Brexit they wanted during the campaign for fear that it could be picked apart by Remainers. Now they had to deliver an undefined Brexit. One serving minister says: “It was a clever ruse not to say what Brexit looked like but it is the root of their problems ever since.”
Worse still, by turning on each other when Mr Cameron resigned after the referendum, they gifted the leadership to the pragmatic and Remain-backing Mrs May. Though she vowed to carry out Brexit, the destiny of their dream was out of their hands. The real hardliners are still no more than a quarter of Tory MPs, but it is the absence of a majority that has magnified their influence and exacerbated the chaos.
What lies at the heart of the visceral Conservative hostility to the EU? For one cabinet minister, its root is in romanticism. “It is the belief in UK exceptionalism; just like Trump’s belief in American exceptionalism, the belief we are a special country.”
For these MPs the indignities of the past two years have been hard to take. They have seen the UK humbled in negotiations and forced to bow before the demands of Ireland. Far easier then to blame invidious Europeans, incompetent leaders and treacherous establishment civil servants.
Edmund Burke, arguably the greatest philosopher of conservatism, wrote more than 200 years ago: “It is with infinite caution that any man ought to venture upon pulling down an edifice which has answered in any tolerable degree for ages the common purposes of society, or on building it up again without having models and patterns of approved utility before his eyes.”
This perhaps represents the difference between Tory Remainers and pragmatists seeking a traditionally Conservative compromise to try to make Brexit work, and those hardliners demanding an absolutist leap of faith. The fiercest Brexiters are unafraid to pull down the existing model without any clear plan to replace it. It is an utterly revolutionary approach. Now the revolution is consuming its own. Their enemies are not only Mrs May, whom they believe has shown weakness by making clear she would not leave without a deal, but also the committed Leavers who are standing by her. The stakes could not be higher. The alternatives to her plan could be no deal or no Brexit at all.
The struggle will continue whatever the outcome but positions are now so entrenched that a breakaway by either side cannot be ruled out. Mrs May will need opposition votes to avoid a no-deal Brexit. Not even the hardliners can control the whirlwind they have unleashed. There is no reason to believe the Conservatives’ euro fever is going to break any time soon.
Timeline
Conservative splits over Europe
September 1988:
Jacques Delors tells the TUC conference in Bournemouth that social protection should be at the heart of the European project
Twelve days later, in a speech in Bruges in Belgium, Margaret Thatcher warned about a “European superstate exercising a new dominance from Brussels”.
November 1990
Thatcher resigns as prime minister after failing to win a decisive victory in a challenge to her party leadership from the pro-European Michael Heseltine.
July 1995
The Conservatives hold a leadership election after John Major challenged his critics by standing down as leader. He won the vote comfortably against the prominent EU critic John Redwood
January 2013
David Cameron says the British people must “have their say” on Europe as he pledges to hold a referendum on EU membership if the Conservatives win the next election
June 2016
Cameron hoped a referendum would stop Europe from “poisoning” British politics. Instead, 51.9 per cent of people voted to leave the EU.
December 2018
Theresa May survives an attempt by rebel MPs to oust her as Conservative leader.
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