The Tory Case
East and West
Home Truths about World Affairs
ALLEN LANE
an imprint of
PENGUIN BOOKS
ALLEN LANE
Published by the Penguin Group
Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
Penguin Group (USA)Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, USA
Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3
(a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)
Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd)
Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road,
Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd)
Penguin Books India Pvt Ltd, 11 Community Centre,
Panchsheel Park, New Delhi – 110 017, India
Penguin Group (NZ), cnr Airborne and Rosedale Roads, Albany,
Auckland 1310, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd)
Penguin Books (South Africa)(Pty)Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue,
Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa
Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England
www.penguin.com
First published 2005
I
Copyright © Chris Patten, 2005
The moral right of the author has been asserted
All rights reserved
Without limiting the rights under copyright
reserved above, no part of this publication may be
reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system,
or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording or otherwise)without the prior
written permission of both the copyright owner and
the above publisher of this book
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
EISBN: 978–0–141–90265–4
For my family
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgements
1 Now We are Sixty
2 Not Tuppence for the Rest
3 National Sovereignty and the Descent of Conservatism
4 Poodle or Partner?
5 From Brussels to Istanbul
6 Strong Nouns, Weak Verbs
7 Neighbourhood Watch
8 Happy Families
9 Invincible but Vulnerable
10 Meanwhile, Asia Rises
11 An Education to the World
Index
(Photographic acknowledgedments are given in parentheses)
1 CP going home from Hong Kong on Britannia (author’s collection)
2 CP and Blair in Hong Kong (author’s collection)
3 CP answering questions in the European Parliament (Audiovisual Library of the European Commission)
4 CP during a press conference in the European Parliament in 2004 (Audiovisual Library of the European Commission)
5 Margaret Thatcher and Willie Whitelaw in 1975 (PA/PA/Empics)
6 Margaret Thatcher and President Reagan (AP/Empics)
7 CP and Javier Solana (Gerard Cerles/AFP/Getty Images)
8 CP and Kofi Annan (Thierry Roge/Reuters/Corbis)
9 CP and Colin Powell (Audiovisual Library of the European Commission)
10 CP and Bill Clinton (author’s collection)
11 CP and Madeleine Albright (Luis d’Orey/Reuters 2000)
12 CP, Anna Lindh and Yasser Arafat in 2001(Ahmed Jadallah/Reuters)
13 The ‘security fence’ in the West Bank (Yoav Lemmer/AFP/Getty Images
14 Graffiti in the Gaza Strip (Brendan Corr/Panos Pictures)
15 Vladimir Putin, Gerhard Schröeder and Jacques Chirac (Maxim Marmur/Reuters/Corbis)
16 Russian troops in Grozny, Chechnya (V. Velengurin/R.P.G./ Corbis Sygma)
17 Balkan refugees (Chris Hondros/Getty Images)
18 Supporting Turkey in the European Parliament (Gerard Cerles/AFP/Getty Images)
19 Dominique de Villepin and Jack Straw (Pierre Schwartz/Corbis)
20 A hot reception in Sri Lanka, 2003 (Anuruddha Lokuhapuarachchi/Reuters)
21 CP and General Musharraf (AP/AP/Empics)
22 Iraqi women with election leaflets (Eric de Castro/Reuters/Corbis)
23 Islamic Alliance supporters demonstration, Pakistan (Arif Ali/AFP/Getty Images)
24 Guantánamo detainees (Shane T. Mccoy/AP/Empics)
25 Poster in support of the Kyoto agreement (Brendan Smialowski/AFP/Getty Images)
26 Quartet Meeting with President Bush and Dick Cheney (Audiovisual Library of the European Commission)
27 Tony Blair and George Bush (Tim Sloan/AFP/Getty Images)
28 Robert Mugabe (Bishop Asare/Panapress/Getty Images)
29 Croix Rouge in Darfur (Thomas Grabka/Laif/Camera Press)
30 CP, Göran Persson and Kim Jong-il (CHIEN-MIN CHUNG/Reuters/Corbis)
31 CP and President Jiang, Beijing (Ng Han Guan/Pool/Reuters)
32 Chinese missiles (Robyn Beck/AFP/Getty Images)
33 Sars epidemic (AFP/AFP/Getty Images)
I had a first-class team of officials in my private office – or cabinet in Brussels-speak – when I was a European Commissioner from 1999 to 2004. For the first three years, it was led by Anthony Cary, for the last two by Patrick Child. They were respectively the best that Britain’s Foreign Office and Treasury could have provided. The whole team contributed to my education and therefore to this book, and Anthony Teesdale who works in the European Parliament helped me to understand its beguiling mysteries. They were all friends and with Lavender and my daughters kept me sane and (usually)quite cheerful. The book represents my own prejudices as refined and occasionally recast by this amiable and accomplished life-support unit, for whom I was not perhaps quite the Commissioner expected. I hope it does not blight any careers.
Once again, I owe a huge debt of gratitude to my agent, Michael Sissons, and to my editor, Stuart Proffitt. I hope that this book will not be as exciting an adventure for Stuart and me as the last one turned out to be.
I can only type with one finger and my writing is tiny and wickedly crabbed. The book would not exist without patient deciphering by my wife, my daughters, Alice and Laura, Dame Shirley Oxenbury and Penny Rankin. Their reward will come in heaven. My eldest daughter, Kate Meikle, should be grateful that she was in Rome while the runes were being read.
… I cannot deny my past to which myself is wed;
The woven figure cannot undo its thread.
‘Valediction’, Louis MacNeice
A few months before starting to write this book, I celebrated my sixtieth birthday. Along with all the sympathetic cards, I received information through the post about my entitlement to a winter fuel allowance and an application form for a ‘free travel’ bus and train pass. I guess these are prized examples of the famed European social model, cradle to (almost) grave, the need for whose comprehensive overhaul is an urgent consequence of Europe’s long-term demographic changes and of its inadequate recent efforts to reinvigorate its economy. Social solidarity requires growth to pay for it, and growth requires workers to create it.
European assumptions about welfarism need to be reviewed; so do the opinions, with which citizens of my generation have grown to adulthood and aged into retirement, about the way our world works and is made both prosperous and secure. The old clichés of international governance and alliance – the Atlantic partnership, European integration, shared Western values – have given way in the blink of an eye to another set of clichés – shifting tectonic plates, the Union that hit the buffers, the Republic that became an empire. Nothing in politics is forever except, it seems, Britain’s existential hunt for its own identity: to lose ourselves in Europe or to discover our postimperial role as America’s spear carrier – or at least its interpreter and apologist to the world’s wimps. Meanwhile, the great if perennially crisis-wracked European project – a union of free-trading democracies – strikes out in directions unimagined by those who first created it around Franco-German reconciliation. And Washington’s leaders of the Free World (as we used to call our alliance against Soviet tyranny and Communist advance) seem keen to close the chapter, which they above all others have written, and which described, regulated and sustained so much of the life of our planet for half a century. If the Western Front has fundamentally changed, or been broken by events and cultural disjuncture, what international configuration will emerge during the short interval of years before the rise of China and India reshapes the world’s power politics?
I have lived my life as a pretty enthusiastic citizen of America’s undeclared empire, which chose deliberately not to impose an emperor on its denizens: a touch, that, of political genius. I was born the month before the D-Day landings brought American boots and blood to French soil for the second time in under thirty years. My father was not one of that military host. He was serving in Palestine with the Royal Air Force, leaving behind his pregnant wife and my older sister. My mother had made her wartime home in her parents’ cathedral city, Exeter, until much of it was flattened in an air raid. She went north to live on the Lancashire coast beyond Blackpool in a seaside house owned by my father’s brother-in-law, a prosperous wholesale vegetable merchant. There I was born in the modest comfort of a home bought, with appropriate symmetry, from the proceeds of imported Irish potatoes, whose terrible dearth had driven my father’s forebears from Ireland to Lancashire in the previous century.
My wife’s father was less fortunate than mine. A Cambridge athlete from the generation after the young men remembered in Chariots of Fire, he hurdled in the 1936 Berlin Olympics, briefly made a career with Imperial Chemical Industries (ICI) and then joined the Seaforth Highlanders at the outbreak of war. He fought through north Africa and Sicily, went to Normandy in time for the fight across the bocage and was killed just after the Allied breakout at Falaise, shortly before my wife’s birth. The list of the war dead at his Cambridge college, Pembroke, contains German names as well as British, Dominion and American. Other college memorials at Oxford and Cambridge tell the same story. We brought young men together at our eminent universities to learn about the values of Western civilization, and then they returned to their homes and were required in due course to kill one another – from Newman’s ‘umbrageous groves’ to trenches and tanks and the war graves of Europe, like the one near Caen where Major John Thornton, the Seaforth Highlander, lies.
The American boys who came from high corn and blue grass, from tenement block and front porch, to help save Europe once again from the bloody results of rampant nationalism, were led by men who believed that the young of their nation should not be required a third time to cross the Atlantic to rescue the old world. Europe’s cemeteries contained too many of their own young heroes already. So it was scarcely surprising that American leaders, policy makers and diplomats were such enthusiastic supporters of the efforts to prevent another European civil war through a unique pooling of sovereignty between France, Germany and four other countries, initially achieved by bringing together the industries that fed modern conflict – coal and steel. European integration was an American geo-strategic objective from the very start, and for Washington it was desirable that Britain should be part of the enterprise. Our American friends did not share our own opinion that Britain could sit benignly, patronizingly, apart from the construction of a new Europe as the cherished friend and valued partner of the superpower, the leader of its own worldwide Empire turned Commonwealth, the sagacious well-wisher to our Continental neighbours in their quaint endeavours. Whatever the gallantry of our recent history, whatever the majesty of Churchill’s prose, Britain was no longer a top dog, even though we could still lay claim to invitations to the top table.
I grew up during the years when Churchill still growled Britain’s past glories, but when his war time lieutenants, Eden and Macmillan, were confronted in their different ways with the reality of Britain’s decline. Discharged from the RAF, my father had gone to London, building on the pre-war contacts he had made as a professional musician, to become a popular music publisher, working in Tin Pan Alley. We lived in semi-detached suburban West London, an environment about which I have a passingly Proustian sensitivity. The suburban front-garden smell, to which Michael Frayn alludes at the beginning of his novel Spies, I was able to identify immediately – privet! I spring from that world of privet hedges, mock-Tudor, cherry blossom, and well-polished family cars, embalmed between London’s arterial roads and its Underground lines, the world in full bloom at the polar extremes of the Central line from Hainault to West Ruislip. My older sister and I were brought up in the sort of loving, comfortable home that should entitle a writer these days to sue for deprivation of literary royalties – no story here of abuse and hardship. My parents were not very political. Indeed, I suspect that my mother would have thought it vaguely indecent and certainly uncomfortable to get involved in a deep – let alone rowdy – discussion of either politics or religion. She had converted to Catholicism, with what insights of faith I know not, in order to marry my father. We were what is called ‘practising’ Catholics: Mass every Sunday, fish every Friday, convent school for my sister, Benedictines for fortunate me. I can still repeat most of the responses to the Latin Mass from my years in the Guild of St Stephen as an altar boy for the local, always Irish, clergy; the smell of the communion wine on their breath in the early mornings; and in one sad case the whiff of something a little stronger.
The first international event I recall, courtesy of the Daily Express, was the gallantry of the ‘Glorious Gloucesters’ in the Korean War; of much greater consequence was the Suez debacle in 1956. My father had only recently taken me aside, with much embarrassment all round, to give me a little booklet explaining, improbably, how I might in the future play my part in reproducing the species. He told me for a second time that he wanted to say a word to me privately. I was not to tell my mother or sister. What he had to say would only worry them. Events in the Middle East looked very dangerous. The British and French invasion of Egypt could trigger another much larger war. The weapons now available in the world were more terrible than any he had seen used in the last war. I might have to be prepared to behave with a maturity beyond my years – taking responsibility, for example, for my mother and sister. We returned gravely and discreetly to the two other members of the family, unaware as they were of the gathering shadows apprehended by my father. Fortunately, President Eisenhower pulled the plug on this crazy Middle Eastern adventure before it went too far, partly because of his proper concern about its impact on opinion in the Arab world. Anthony Eden went to the Caribbean, and then to a manor house in Wiltshire; Harold Macmillan (‘first in, first out’ in Harold Wilson’s words) went to Downing Street; I went back to cricket and Conan Doyle.
Our house was not very bookish. There were book club editions of Nevil Shute, L. P. Hartley and Nicholas Montserrat, Thor Heyerdahl’s Kon-Tiki adventures, books on Second World War heroes and heroics – escapes, dam-busting, navigating cruel seas. Above all there was Damon Runyon and S. J. Perelman – a mark, I think, of how comfortably and naturally we accommodated ourselves to America’s cultural imperium. My father’s job probably made this inevitable. Before skiffle and the Mersey Sound, most of the popular music he published was from the other side of the Atlantic – the hit tunes of Johnny Ray, Frankie Laine, Guy Mitchell. One of his first big successes was the latter’s ‘She Wears Red Feathers and a Hoolah-Hoolah Skirt’. My parents’ taste was rather better than this. Our 78s featured Frank Sinatra, Ella Fitzgerald, big-band jazz – the music of a country that we instinctively admired and respected, glamorous, generous, gee-whiz. We were Americaphiles. How could we be anything else? All that seemed savviest and sassiest, wittiest and wisest, came from across the Atlantic. Weekly cinema visits confirmed our instincts. From one suburban film palace to another – ‘Don’t be disappointed if we can’t get in,’ my father would say on each of our visits – we followed the cultural trail blazed by Hollywood. It was a nice surprise to discover when I went to Oxford University that other countries had been making films too.
We not only loved America and most things American, without ever having been there. We were also – despite reading Lord Beaver-brook’s daily newspaper – more than comfortable with our Continental neighbours. My own mother, unlike most of my friends’, used garlic when she cooked, and sometimes shopped at an Italian delicatessen in Soho, demonstrating that it was possible to purchase olive oil without going to a chemist’s shop. We went to restaurants whose exotic connections with the Mediterranean were advertised by the wicker-covered Chianti bottles that served as lamps. We sometimes drank wine at meals. My sister – five years older than me – left her convent school for the French lycée, and went to Strasbourg to work for the Council of Europe for her first job, and for her second to Rome with the United Nations. We sometimes holidayed abroad, forsaking beach cricket in Devon for beach cricket (to the surprise of the locals) in Brittany. On our first foreign holiday we drove France’s pavé roads to Luxembourg in my father’s Lanchester. Visiting Paris on the way home I locked myself in the lavatory at the Weppler Hotel, an event which left me timorous about the locks in hotel bathrooms throughout my childhood.
These holidays and my father’s occasional business trips to Radio Luxembourg – the pirate radio station that brought pop music and the football pools forecasts of Keynsham’s Horace Batchelor to the crystal sets of Britain’s youth – instilled in him a huge admiration for the recuperative skills of the French and the Germans. He tended to judge the economic ascent of France almost entirely in terms of the smoothness of the motoring, as the infrastructure of l’Hexagone benefited from post-war recovery. His admiration for Germany’s revival was boundless. By nature a generous and kind man, he spoke more frequently of the spectacular rise of Germany from her wartime legacy of starvation and rubble than of the years he had lost, and the friends too, fighting her. Like Harold Macmillan, though he would not have known it, he regarded Germany’s triumphant economic progress as a knock-down argument for joining her and others in what was then called the Common Market.
I first heard the case for this put with stunning eloquence when I went up to Balliol College, Oxford, in 1962. It was the college of Harold Macmillan, who resigned from the premiership at the beginning of my second academic year, but came in the following calendar year to address his fellow college members as the university’s chancellor. It was the best speech I have ever heard, and I was pleased to hear variants of it, complete with the same thespian gestures and pauses, on several occasions during the following twenty years. The Edwardian drawl, the hooded eyes, the Donald Wolfit excess, the hand movements that followed rather than accompanied the thought just delivered, the magnificent studied put-downs, the mixture of plump archaism with demotic metaphor – all these complemented a simple argument that I have always found totally convincing, though today there is a great deal more that can be added to it. Macmillan began by evoking the long, hot summer of 1914; described the talented friends who had left Oxford with him that year for the Golgotha of Picardy; recounted their experiences as (in Sassoon’s words) ‘citizens of death’s grey land’; counted off those who had never returned; recalled the memorials from the Menin Gate to the great arch at Thiepval, which were forgotten as we drifted into another terrible war; pointed to the historic decisions taken at Messina and in Rome to prevent the slaughter of a third generation on our continent; and said that one day we too must be part of this adventure, whatever the present whim of an old general to whom we had in the past given so much. Know-all young cynics choked back the tears and then stood to cheer, recognizing perhaps that to speak like this of the fire, you have first to pass through it.
In my first year at Oxford, President Kennedy had skilfully defused the Cuban missile crisis, while my left-wing friends marched to the Martyrs’ Memorial to denounce Yankee imperialism. In my second year, Kennedy was shot. There is famously a handful of public events in all our lives, imprinted forever on our memories. Those of us who are old enough all know where we were when we first heard of Kennedy’s assassination, as we remember the circumstances on 11 September 2001, when we learned about or watched on television the atrocities in New York and Washington. During the evening of 22 November 1963, I was at a party given in college by one of my history dons when two or three hard-left students burst into the room to tell us gleefully what had happened in Dallas. For them it was almost a cause of celebration that such a popular American president should be cut down to make way for a man who could not possibly charm the world in the same way. It was the moment of my university years when I felt most outraged and most political.
Politics did not then feature much in my life. I acted, wrote revues, played rugby and cricket, and allowed myself to be stretched intellectually rather less than the elastic would actually have permitted. In so far as I had any political views, they were pretty much bang in the middle. I liked and admired Macmillan, Macleod and Butler, thought Douglas-Home’s selection as Tory leader was absurd, and was attracted by Harold Wilson’s look of modernity until he got into office and we saw him in depressing action. My parents had been gentle, undemonstrative Conservatives, who voted the right way at every election but otherwise seemed largely untouched by political sentiment. That is probably as far as I would have travelled politically myself had it not been for the good fortune of winning my first ever visit to America.
An old member of the college, William Coolidge – a wealthy Boston Brahmin – had established a fund at Balliol as one of his many philanthropic benefactions, to enable a group of those who had just taken their final examinations to cross the Atlantic each year and travel around the USA. I guess that part of the intention was not simply to broaden our horizons but to invest in the creation of future Americaphiles. In most cases, including mine, that was certainly the result. The scholarship in those days was gold-plated. We crossed to New York on the France, drinking cocktails, watching films and failing to pick up American beauties who all seemed to dance like Cyd Charisse. Then we flew up to spend a few days with Mr Coolidge – Bill, as we were encouraged to call him – on his Massachusetts estate where the paintings were even finer than the wine. We were kitted out at the Harvard Coop – lightweight suits and slacks, burgundy loafers, Oxford cotton shirts with button-down collars – given a Hertz credit card and a thousand dollars in traveller’s cheques; presented with a list of Coolidge’s friends and old Balliol men who had agreed to put us up as we travelled the country; and then sent off in pairs to cross and recross America, taking either the northern or southern route.
I drove off in a Dodge Dart for Ohio, Illinois and all points westward with my friend Edward Mortimer (who was to become a distinguished foreign correspondent, commentator and author, and director of communications at the UN). It was my happy experience then and on many subsequent visits to be received everywhere with kindness and generosity. As Charles Dickens said, after his second visit to the United States: ‘Wherever I have been, in the smallest places equally with the largest, I have been received with unsurpassable politeness, delicacy, sweet temper, hospitality and consideration.’ Americans are exquisite hosts. ‘Thank you for visiting with us,’ they would say, as we were fe^ted from Chicago to Billings, Montana, from Salt Lake City to San Francisco and Los Angeles. We were in southern California at the time of the Watts riots, and drove (probably foolishly) through this grim Los Angeles suburb a day or two after most of the violence had subsided. Travelling back east through Las Vegas (where we watched a historically questionable, nude showgirl tableau of the French Revolution), the Grand Canyon, Santa Fe and New Orleans, we had another brush with contemporary history in Alabama. We were driving a hire car with a Pennsylvania number plate and were taken for civil rights workers in a small town where brave young campaigners from northern campuses had recently been murdered. Our host on that part of the trip, a courtly newspaper editor, came to our rescue explaining that we were English – ‘They’re just like us over there,’ he said to a bunch of Alabama rednecks, a comparison for which we were grateful at the time.
Back in New York, with some weeks of the scholarship still to run if we wished, Edward chose to return to Oxford to sit and, as it turned out, win the annual examination to become a Fellow of All Souls, Oxford’s ancient graduate college. What should I do on my own? Bill Coolidge had a bright idea. A rich friend of his was helping to raise money for the mayoral campaign in the city of the Republican Congressman from the silk-stocking district, John Lindsay. It was suggested that I should stay in his friend’s apartment (on 5th and 69th) and help on the campaign, which had its headquarters at the Roosevelt Hotel.
I turned up for duty and was assigned as an assistant to a wonderfully smart young Texan lawyer – Yale and Balliol – who was responsible on the campaign for research, particularly regarding the record of Lindsay’s opponents. Sherwin Goldman was a joy to work for – witty, civilized, generous and smart as a whip. He took me in hand, giving me a crash course in New York, its politics and its cultural delights. Thanks to Sherwin, who now runs the New York City Opera Company, I got to the Met and to see several Balanchine ballets. I was also introduced to the (for me) mostly static mysteries of American football, and had my first pastrami on rye at the Carnegie Deli on 7th Avenue.
It was Sherwin, more than anyone else, who infected me with politics, a virus that I have never subsequently managed to remove from my bloodstream. I was given my head and allowed to focus in particular on the past and present pronouncements of the Conservative candidate in the campaign, William Buckley. ‘Conservative’, in this case, meant well to the right of the moderate Republican, Lindsay. Buckley was a sort of cult Conservative – mannered, funny, well read. He liked to tease and shock, raping and pillaging political correctness in fluently written books and articles. He had worked hard to earn Gore Vidal’s sobriquet ‘Hitler without the charm’. It was a joy to mine his obiter dicta for nonsense and contradiction. I doubt whether much of my material was ever used. Buckley was not really a serious candidate in any sense, commenting memorably when asked what would be the first thing he would do were he to win the mayoralty of that difficult city: ‘Demand a recount.’ His main danger to us was that he might siphon off the right-wing Republican votes that Lindsay would need to beat his uncharismatic, diminutive Democrat opponent. Nevertheless, I was made to feel a crucial cog in the campaign, was given plenty of access to Lindsay himself, and became a sort of mascot – a young novelty Englishman, complete with nice manners, a funny accent and odd vocabulary. A smoker in those days, I recall the first time, like the character in a Bateman cartoon, that I asked for a fag.
John Lindsay was a great candidate – ‘Supercalifragelisticexpialidocious’, as the advertisement on Times Square put it. He was tall, handsome and stylish. He spoke well, looked a dream on television and appeared to enjoy the vulgarities of political campaigning – glad-handing, eating pizzas and hugging New York. I suspect he was probably a better candidate than he was a mayor, though there cannot have been many tougher jobs in those days than running that big, dangerous, glamorous, bankrupt city. He did win, sweeping the Democrats from City Hall, and thus ended for me a glorious fall in New York – golden days, exciting times. In mid-November, I embarked on the old Queen Elizabeth and spent four days throwing up as we crossed the stormy Atlantic.
So I came to politics by this odd if glamorous route, joining the young men and women – mostly career politicians from Oxbridge – in the Conservative Research Department in what I thought would be a fill-in job before taking up a graduate traineeship with the BBC. ‘Fill-in’ became permanent, to the surprise of the BBC and of all my friends. It was the first fateful decision of my life; and the rest is history, of a sort.
Since that first visit to the United States I have returned again and again, as a tourist and holidaymaker, as a lecturer, as a young Member of Parliament, as a minister, as a colonial governor, as a European commissioner, and nowadays as a university chancellor. In a tribute to Roy Jenkins, my predecessor as Oxford’s chancellor, Arthur Schlesinger noted that ‘few British politicians in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries… showed much interest in the United States, or knew much about American history or institutions’. It was only after the Second World War that British politicians like Jenkins, with easier travel by jet, started to go to America in force to find out what it was really like. For my political generation, it would have been inconceivable not to be a regular visitor: there was so much in America that one needed to understand, and in due course there was so much business to do. My only two prolonged visits came, first, when I had just become an MP and, second, when I became a Cabinet Minister. I spent about a month in the summer of 1980, mostly in Washington, as a guest of the State Department, where I made a number of political friends including the moderate Republican Congressman Jim Leach who, were I to require a double (like Saddam Hussein), would do nicely. We have become even more interchangeable as life has broadened us both. In 1989, as the newly appointed Environment Secretary in Margaret Thatcher’s last Cabinet, I spent a month at Berkeley, the visit arranged by a close friend, Professor Nelson Polsby, possessor of one of the sharpest minds and certainly the sharpest tongue in North America. We took our holiday there, swapping our Westminster flat and Wiltshire cottage for a funky, clapboard house just off the gourmet strip in Berkeley. There was a loom in the front room, and mind-clearing, life-changing works by Indian mystics and gurus in the bookcases. It was meant to be a working holiday. I had to give a few lectures and seminars to justify the trip. The routine was hardly demanding but it was certainly bracing. Politicians need an occasional intellectual rub-down, and Nelson and his colleagues used a loofah.
*
As a specifically British minister and public servant, my contacts with America, with its political classes and policy makers, have centred on two issues, about which I shall have more to say later in this book. My first ministerial job was as Parliamentary Secretary in the Northern Ireland Office under Jim Prior and Douglas Hurd. Since then my career has been intermittently entangled with the affairs of the Province and the attempts to promote political reconciliation on our archipelago, most recently as Chairman of the Independent Commission on Policing in Northern Ireland, set up under the Belfast Agreement of 1998. As a moderate and as a Catholic, I was often despatched to America to take part in conferences on the divided politics of the North and to lobby about security issues. In the first category of events, I would find myself alongside moderate spokesmen for Dublin’s position (like Peter Sutherland and Mary Robinson) sharing platforms with Nationalist, Republican and Unionist leaders from the North. I used to think it educational for audiences from Boston to Los Angeles to observe the Northern Irish politicians telling audiences how culturally different they were from their political foes as they appeared with every passing row more and more similar. Peter, Mary and Iwould occasionally get in a word ourselves, the moderates from either shore of the Irish Sea.
Talking to American audiences in those days, and particularly lobbying on Capitol Hill, amounted to a crash course in American exceptionalism. This reflects the central role that America has played as an actor rather than a disinterested observer in so many of the dramas of the Irish story – the famine, the plague ships, the formation of the Fenians, and gunrunning in the cause of liberation and anti-colonialism. The attitude of many Americans is more naïve than hypocritical; they fail to realize how subjective is the neat division of the world into evil terrorists and noble freedom fighters. For me to use the word ‘terrorism’ in the context of Northern Ireland during those visits was to risk a rumpus. Friends of mine had been killed by the Irish Republican Army (IRA). I had no sympathy for the use of violence for political ends: I thought it wicked. I was pleased to have the chance to argue from time to time that it was (to put at it at its mildest) ‘unhelpful’ that the IRA could raise money pretty openly in American cities, where they would also spend it on acquiring weapons. For those fighting Irish terrorism, America was in this sense arguably a much bigger problem than, say, Libya. If terrorism simply divided ‘us’ from ‘them’, then in this case America was with ‘them’.
I never got anywhere with my arguments. I conceded, of course, many of the grievances of Irish history: I was, after all, a British citizen because of the greatest of them all. I argued against Unionist intransigence, which has again and again searched for ways of extracting defeat from the jaws of victory, ensuring that each time the Unionist leaders are driven by reality to negotiate, they have to do so from a weaker position than the last time they were at the table. I accepted that to accomplish our security objectives there would have to be a political settlement, though this stuck in the craw of all who thought terrorist slaughter evil. In other contexts than Irish politics this sort of political realism would have been called by my American interlocutors ‘rewarding violence’. But nothing changed. The collecting tins continued to be passed around; the weapons were purchased; and Irish Republican leaders who had killed and maimed were regularly welcomed to the White House – until the McCartney sisters came along – from which had rung out in recent years so many absolutist sermons about the wickedness of terrorism.
Chairing the policing commission on Northern Ireland, I made several visits to the USA with members of my team. We received much help on technical policing issues from local police chiefs, many of whom are from the Irish diaspora. We also discovered how much tougher were the rules of engagement for Northern Ireland’s police officers, when faced with public order violence, than for most American forces. We were comprehensively grilled by American civil liberties organizations and by politicians about past policing practices and the steps we intended to take to make sure that the reformed and reorganized police service in Northern Ireland gave a proper and transparent priority to human rights. Iregarded interrogation on these issues as wholly reasonable, and regarded our ability to satisfy these American expert concerns as one of the benchmarks for the success of our report. For me, this experience has cast an interesting light on Abu Ghraib, Guantánamo Bay and other related matters.
The second issue, which brought me sharply into contact with American attitudes and policies, also concerned human rights, this time in Hong Kong. I have written elsewhere of my efforts as the last governor of Hong Kong to deliver on at least some of the promises made to its citizens about democracy, the rule of law and civil liberties. The support that I got in these endeavours was at best mixed. The British Government was fine, though you did not need a higher degree in reading body language to recognize that there were parts of Whitehall that believed I was several sandwiches short of a picnic. The British business community was at best nervously polite about me, but mostly hostile. The media, on the other hand, were pretty friendly. European opinion was curious about the whole fuss, by and large taking the view that this was a bit of last-minute British grandstanding. France, in particular, was not going to let anything interfere with the aims of its commercial diplomacy in China. For the most consistent, intelligent and outspoken support, I could look only to the USA. President Clinton, the State Department and politicians from both parties were regularly and openly helpful. American nongovernmental organizations, lawyers’ groups and human rights lobbyists batted for us; the media too. Above all, the local American business community was intelligently forthright about the importance of respecting and retaining the protection of Hong Kong’s liberties through the rule of law, strong institutions and our first limited essays at democratic accountability. Again and again, they made the connection between economic liberty and political liberty, between Hong Kong’s economic success and its way of life as a free society. It was good to have some friends who believed so uninhibitedly in the same things as I did – and were prepared to say so.
In the early stages of my political life, I was little involved in European affairs. Of course, the issue of Britain’s membership of the Common Market – or European Community, as we came to describe it – squatted in the middle of national politics, seeping poison into the main parties. Only the Liberals, metamorphosed by Labour’s upheavals of the 1980s (partly provoked by Europe) into Liberal Democrats, remained ever faithful to the European project, while periodically benefiting from its unpopularity through the support of electors who regarded their votes as a way of registering a protest against the other parties rather than as an endorsement of the whims and fancies of Liberalism’s high command.
Others with whom I worked in the Conservative Party had long been involved in various pro-European organizations, arguing the case for Britain’s European destiny in language often as extreme as that of their opponents within the party. But the opposition was definitely in the minority, usually regarded as slightly cranky as well as ‘unhelpful’, a dreadful thing to be in mainstream Tory circles. The Conservative Party usually liked to follow its leader and it liked to be liked. The leadership was pro-European, so the loyal thing to be was pro-Europe. Moreover, bright young party members touched by the sort of ambitions that help drive our political system and government, would naturally wish to reflect the attitudes and vision of their elders. Were you more likely to be chosen for a plum parliamentary constituency by declaring your belief in Britain’s membership of a club she could aspire to lead (while naturally preserving the ‘special relationship’ with America), or by doubting the geo-strategic wisdom of Macmillan, Douglas-Home, Heath and all the rest? It was no contest. You also had the comfort of knowing that most newspapers would applaud your pro-European views and excoriate any heresy. Several newspapers, which were then more uncritically pro-European than I have ever been, have in the intervening years totally changed their tune, perhaps – as they claim – because Europe has been transformed into a different enterprise, or perhaps because their proprietors and editors have changed or have switched their views.
There will be time later to examine just how much the European project has altered, and to consider whether there is any truth in the argument that we were sold a pup, signing up to one thing while getting quite another. What the proponents of this argument usually mean is that what we agreed to was a free-trade area but that we have found ourselves trapped in a federalist union well on the way to becoming a superstate. Odd, really, for us to join what was allegedly no more than a free-trade area, when we were already part of one, called exactly that – the European Free Trade Area (EFTA) – an organization that manifestly failed to meet our economic or political aims. The European Community that we joined expressed in those days more explicitly federalist ambitions than are usually heard today except in one or two odd corners of Europe’s chancelleries and parliaments. The federalist model exists in its most potent, albeit fictitious, form in London newspaper offices.
In 1975, shortly after I had become Director of the Conservative Research Department, we fought the referendum campaign purportedly to determine whether the cosmetic changes negotiated by Harold Wilson in our terms of membership were sufficient to allow us to confirm our place in the Community. As has been the case with Britain’s two other European referendum commitments, this one was a result of government weakness. Wilson wanted to hold his party together, split as it was over Europe. The successful campaign achieved this in the short term, but short meant short. Throughout the early 1980s Labour tore itself to shreds over the subject, provoking the departure from its ranks of some of its most attractive figures as well as the establishment of the Social Democratic Party, and ensuring that it was unelectable until Neil Kinnock and then Tony Blair put it back together again. Labour’s turmoil in the 1980s presaged that in the Conservative Party a decade later.
The referendum campaign was the first time I had worked closely with Margaret Thatcher, who had only recently been elected leader of the party in a surging peasants’ revolt against the incumbent, Edward Heath. As the party’s leading European, he was brought huffily out of the tent to which he had retreated to lick his wounds (a process that took many years), to play a prominent part in the all-party Yes campaign. Thatcher was for once wisely happy to play second fiddle. But it was not because of any hesitation about the cause. She made some good pro-European speeches, which I helped to draft, and never tried by word or gesture to put any distance between herself and Heath and his co-campaigners.
One of those on the other side of the argument was my wife Lavender’s uncle, Sir Derek Walker-Smith, who later became a life peer, taking the name of his Hertfordshire constituency, Broxbourne. Derek Walker-Smith was a distinguished Conservative parliamentarian and a successful barrister. He had entered the House of Commons after the war, chaired the backbenchers’ 1922 Committee and been appointed Minister of Health by Harold Macmillan. He was never happy about the decision to sue for terms to join the European Community. His argument was principled and, as I shall argue later, the core of the case that has to be answered one way or the other, once and for all, if Britain is ever to come to terms with its place in Europe. For Derek, the great struggles in British history had been to establish and safeguard the sovereignty of Parliament. The law was made at Westminster, and interpreted and administered by the courts and judges of the land. By signing the Treaty of Rome we were conceding the supremacy of another law-making body – the European Council and Parliament – and accepting that European courts and judges should have overriding authority in the maintenance of the rule of law in Britain. This represented a rupture in our history. It changed fundamentally the way we were governed, the way free men and women chose to run their own affairs – and could they then be as free as they once had been? Were we not surrendering cherished liberties?
Derek Walker-Smith put his case for many years with the skill of a top-class courtroom advocate. The clauses of each sentence were locked in place with a jeweller’s skill; the very rotundity of his prose caused gentle amusement. I once heard him declare, ‘When I hear the words “economic and monetary union”, I am able without undue strain or difficulty to contain my enthusiasm within the bounds of public decorum.’ They don’t, as my father would have said, make them like that these days. Walker-Smith fought the good fight at Westminster and he took it to the European Parliament where he became, in his later years, the chairman of its legal affairs committee. He was obsessive about his arguments in the sense that he did not give up putting them. But he did not allow this passion to subsume all other considerations: the Conservative Party’s political prospects, the national interest, the obligation on responsible politicians to eschew mindless populism, moderation in all things. He did not set out to wreck the Conservative Party with whose leaders he had disagreed, and since the die had been cast believed that the role he should play was to make the best of what had been decided. This was the national interest, and he served it in the European Parliament and in organizations of European lawyers.
As a minister, my first experience of working in Brussels came as a member of the Council of Development Ministers; indeed I was plunged into chairing it since my promotion to the Overseas Development Administration coincided with the periodic six-month British presidency of the Community. Our main task and achievement was the reform of Europe’s policy of food aid, preventing the dumping of surpluses on poor, developing countries in ways that threatened their ability to sustain indigenous agricultural production. I was also caught up in lengthy renegotiation of the Lomé Convention, which had brought Europe and most of its former colonies together in a contractual trade and cooperation agreement that had first come into force in 1976. I co-chaired with a smart finance minister from Senegal the subcommittee that determined the amount of aid that would lubricate the deal and found myself locked into what has become a familiar position down the years, between the rhetoric of heads of government and the more down-to-earth preoccupations of their finance ministers.
After three years in that job I was moved in 1989 to the Environment Department, a lumbering Whitehall giant that covered a range of sensitive issues from planning, housing, urban regeneration and water privatization to local government, local tax and national and international environmental protection. Environmental issues had shot up the political agenda, with a surge of support for Green candidates in the elections that year for the European Parliament. It was thought that the department needed a friendlier face after the stewardship of my predecessor Nicholas Ridley, whose many qualities did not include public geniality.
Ridley was close to Margaret Thatcher, and a strong believer in markets. In private and in public he was stridently (and for him, in due course, fatally) critical of the European enterprise. He was by no means a safe politician, so while the Prime Minister was happy to comfort herself from time to time with his prejudices, she probably recognized that his ability to self-detonate made it necessary to keep him at a safe distance. Like Norman Tebbit, he did however have a licence to snarl. Michael Heseltine, Ridley’s predecessor as Environment Secretary, had taken a particularly active interest in the economic and social renewal of Liverpool after the riots there in 1981. The Archbishop and Bishop in the city, heads respectively of the Catholic and Anglican dioceses, were particularly grateful for his leadership. When Ridley moved into the office, he showed no interest in the city whatsoever, and after some months, the religious leaders asked if they could go and see him. The meeting was worse than frosty. Mr Heseltine, they noted, had regarded himself as the Minister with Special Responsibility for Liverpool. Did he, Nick Ridley, feel the same? Well, he drawled, he was responsible for protecting the natterjack toad, for combating pollution and for the discharge of sewage sludge, so he supposed he could add Liverpool to his list. Hearts and minds did not meet.