Beaten By The Bastards

Ferdinand Mount on an underrated prime minister, and how the Eurosceptics finished him off.

They got him in the end. Those implacable ironsides finally bagged their first sitting prime minister. We must salute their stamina, if nothing else. Iain Duncan Smith, Bernard Jenkin and Liam Fox started their jihad against the EU in general and the Maastricht Treaty in particular within months of being elected to Parliament in 1992. Within three years, they had launched their first coup: ‘Redwood versus Deadwood’ (the Sun, June 25, 1995). It didn’t come off, although it came closer than polite opinion liked to admit. But John Major was mortally wounded by ‘the Bastards’, and the electorate put him out of his misery only two years later. The Bastards cannot have expected then that it would all take so long. Cobden and Bright needed only eight years for their AntiCorn Law League to gain its objectives. John Bright’s descendant, Bill Cash, has spent thirty years on his crusade.

The Bruges Group, the Referendum Party and the UK Independence Party have never missed an opportunity to badmouth Brussels, egged on by the Daily Telegraph’s inventive young EC correspondent, B Johnson (Brussels 1989–94). If the Left were not so absorbed by its own writings, it would recognise the slow saturation of the Conservative Party by the Europhobes as a classic example of Gramsci’s ‘long march through the institutions’. They did not need every Tory MP to come out as an Outer. To achieve hegemony, it was enough that upcoming young thrusters, such as David Cameron, should feel compelled to talk the language of Euroscepticism to get selected. By contrast, the believers in the European ideal lost their voices, and by the time the referendum came along, it was too late to recover them.