The Worm in the Apple

A History of the Conservative Party and Europe from Churchill to Cameron

Christopher Tugendhat

• Publisher: Haus Publishing
• Year: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781913368548
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

The first extensive history of the relationship between the UK Conservative Party and the European Union. The Conservative Party has been in power for 47 of the 65 years since the end of World War II. During that time the division within the party over Europe has been the enduring drama of British politics—from Churchill's decision not to join the original European Coal and Steel Community in 1951 to Cameron's decision to hold the Brexit referendum in 2016. Other leaders came and went, but the issue was always there—sometimes center-stage, at others behind the scenes—destabilizing foreign policy, corroding the body politic, and destroying several of the party's leaders. These questions, and how they panned out, created a deep, grumbling discontent—the worm in the apple—that, over time, turned the Conservative Party and, by extension, a significant section of the electorate, against British membership of the EU. By telling the story of the arguments and divisions within the Conservative Party, The Worm in the Apple helps to explain why Britain voted to leave the European Union in 2016.

1

Missed Opportunities 1946–1959

Dean Acheson, who served as American secretary of state during the post-war years, entitled his autobiography Present at the Creation. He was justified in doing so. During the decade after 1945, almost all the great international organisations with which we are familiar today, or their predecessors, were established – the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the World Trade Organization, the World Health Organization, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, the European Union, and others. In all bar one of these that have had Britain as a member, British ministers and officials played a major role in setting them up and forming their working practices.

The exception is the European Union (EU), which began with the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC), established in 1951 by France, West Germany,¹ Italy, the Netherlands, Belgium, and Luxembourg. The same six countries then created the European Economic Community (EEC) in 1957; after various enlargements and reforms, this became the EU in 1993.² In the aftermath of the war, the architects of those institutions would have welcomed British participation. But both Clement Attlee’s Labour government and its Conservative successor under Winston Churchill declined to join the ECSC, and Anthony Eden’s Conservative administration decided against the EEC. When, in 1961, Harold Macmillan wanted to reverse that decision, General de Gaulle, as president of France, imposed a veto. A second attempt in 1967 by the Labour prime minister Harold Wilson met the same fate. Only after the general’s departure was the Conservative Ted Heath able to lead Britain into the EEC on 1 January 1973.

From this simple fact stems many of the grievances and misunderstandings that bedevilled Britain’s relationship with the other member states and the European Commission during the next forty-seven years. By the time Britain joined, the essential character of the organisation, its institutional structure, its working methods, its core policies, and its aspirations had been established. So, too, had the language and imagery in which those aspirations were clothed. There had been no British input. It had been formed by alien ideas and principles and was based on unfamiliar practices – mainly, but not only, French.

In other international organisations, British ministers and officials felt instantly at home; in the EEC, everything was unfamiliar. Over time – by which I mean decades – as officials built their careers dealing with Brussels and negotiating with the other member states, sections of the British civil service became as familiar with the system as those of other countries. This was never true of ministers. It is striking, however, how often they changed their minds, usually grudgingly and without enthusiasm, as they discovered how British interests, both within Europe and beyond, could be furthered and maintained through the endless negotiations that characterise the EU’s working methods.

As for the British public, the consequences of our late arrival quickly became apparent to me when, in 1977, as a newly appointed commissioner, I began addressing audiences in both Britain and other member states on European issues. I found that most people in this country simply did not feel the same sense of commitment towards, or faith in, the European venture as their counterparts in other European countries.

The differences were fundamental. People in other member states, not everyone everywhere but a solid and sufficient core, regarded the European venture as a means of overcoming the historic rivalries of the past that had led to war, and adapting them to peaceful purposes for which it was worth sacrificing elements of national sovereignty. A belief that I shared. The British, apart from a small minority, were untouched by this sense of historic purpose and regarded joining the Common Market, as they generally then called the EEC, in purely economic and utilitarian terms.

Whereas others saw the somewhat vague aspiration of ‘ever closer union’ as an expression of their desire to banish the past and create a better future, many in Britain regarded it as a threat to their sense of identity and national sovereignty. This was at least as true of Conservatives as of anyone else, even though it had been Heath’s Conservative government that had taken Britain into the EEC, and the Conservative Party, by then led by Margaret Thatcher, that had contributed more than any other to winning the 1975 referendum that confirmed British membership. I recognised, in the light of these differences, that building a firm base of support for the EEC in Britain, let alone generating enthusiasm, would be an uphill struggle. I did not expect to live to see it end in failure. And I certainly did not expect it to be another Conservative prime minister who would lead the country out with the overwhelming support of his party, the party of which I have been a member since the 1950s.

Could it have been otherwise? Could Britain have been a founder member? Could Britain even have provided the foundation on which the whole edifice of post-war Europe was built?

In 1945 Britain’s reputation in Europe stood at an all-time high. It was the only European country to have fought against Nazi Germany from the beginning to the end of the war and never to have been defeated or occupied. It had stood alone in 1940 and 1941 and later, in conjunction with the United States and the Soviet Union, had played a major role in liberating the continent in 1944 and 1945. Jean Monnet, the Frenchman whose vision and behind-the-scenes political skills played a crucial role in the formation of the ECSC, had initially turned to Britain as ‘a nucleus around which a European Community might be formed’. He saw it as ‘the one great power in Europe which was then in a position to take on such responsibility’.³ Having served as a senior French official in London during the First World War and again in London and Washington during the Second, he was well connected across the British establishment, but when he informally floated his ideas in London they fell on deaf ears.

General de Gaulle, too, initially regarded Britain as indispensable. After Churchill had made a great speech in Zurich in September 1946 calling for a united Europe based on the twin pillars of France and Germany,⁴ he sought the views of the general, who, like him, was at that time out of office. De Gaulle replied that ‘if French support was to be won for the idea of European union, France must come in as a founder partner with Britain. Moreover, the two countries must reach a precise understanding with one another upon the attitude to be adopted towards Germany before any approaches were made to the latter’.⁵

Why, then, did it not happen? Why did Britain, under a Labour government from 1945 to 1951 and thereafter a Conservative one, not become an influential founder member of what is now the EU?

The answer is to be found in the nature of British politics and the country’s international relations agenda during the years after the Second World War. The overwhelming international preoccupation-of British ministers and politicians of both parties was the Cold War with its front line in Germany. There, the armies of the Western Alliance, led by the United States and including a large British contingent, faced those of the Soviet bloc, each side armed with nuclear weapons ready for instant use. In 1948 and 1949 the threat of war seemed very close. In February 1948 the Soviet Union, already in control of most of Eastern Europe, took over Czechoslovakia. Then, from June 1948 until May 1949, the Soviet army blockaded Berlin and the American, British, and French forces occupying the city. As the Allied air forces flew in supplies of food and other necessities on a daily basis, the world lived on tenterhooks.

The threat of war continued into the 1950s and beyond. In his history of the period, Having it So Good, Peter Hennessy gives an example of the type of question the Cold War obliged the Cabinet to consider. In 1954, the top-secret Strath Committee ‘estimated that ten ten-megaton Soviet H-bombs dropped on the UK would kill 12 million people and seriously injure a further 4 million (nearly a third of the population) even before the poisonous effects of radioactive fallout spread across the country’.⁶

On defence matters Britain took the lead in post-war Europe. It played a key role in the formation and development of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO). It was similarly constructive in the creation and running of the structures for administering the Marshall Plan by means of which the United States contributed massive financial aid for the reconstruction of the Western European economies, including Britain’s. To the Americans and British alike, NATO and the Marshall Plan were complementary means of helping Western Europe to withstand the Soviet threat. But the British were fundamentally not interested in, and did not take seriously, the efforts of political leaders on the continent to establish economic structures designed to underpin a drive towards political unity. As will become apparent, the Americans took a different view.

In Westminster and Whitehall, those efforts had to jostle for attention with a host of other issues that in the eyes of British ministers commanded more immediate attention. Prominent among them between 1951 (when the Conservatives returned to power after six years of Labour government) and 1954 was the Korean War, in which 15,000 British troops fought alongside the Americans against the North Koreans and Chinese. Another that aroused very strong feelings within the Conservative Party was the saga of the Suez Canal. This began with a heated debate over whether Britain should give up its treaty rights and influence in Egypt and withdraw from its military base guarding the Suez Canal, as Churchill, to the fury of some of his backbenchers, decided to do in 1954. It reached its zenith when the Egyptians nationalised the canal in July 1956, thereby triggering a joint British and French military operation to re-take it in November of that year. The humiliating failure of this operation, as a result of intense American economic pressure on the British, led, as usually happens after a military defeat, to bitter recriminations. Other problems included Iran’s nationalisation in 1951 of the British oil refinery at Abadan, then regarded as a vital national interest, and the colonial uprisings in Kenya, Cyprus, and Malaya.

Besides this press of events, there was a widespread view across the political spectrum that the war had shown Britain to be qualitatively different from other European countries and that their rivalries were such that it was most unlikely that they would ever be able to put together any lasting arrangements among themselves. Far more important than closer ties with Europe, according to this view, were relations with the Commonwealth and the United States, who had proved their reliability during the war. This was also the opinion of most of the senior officials in the Foreign Office and the Treasury. Events were to show that it was a great mistake to underestimate the Europeans in this way, but it is understandable that those who had lived through the war should have thought as they did.

While leading the party in opposition from 1945 to 1951, Churchill made important and attention-grabbing speeches about the future of Europe, but, as the 1951 Conservative election manifesto spelt out, this subject was neither his nor his party’s principal non-domestic concern. Top of the list came ‘the safety, progress and cohesion of the British Empire and Commonwealth’,⁷ next the United States, and, in third place, Europe. As Roy Jenkins explains in his biography of Churchill, leading continental figures in the drive towards a united Europe, such as Monnet, the Belgian Paul-Henri Spaak, and the German chancellor, Konrad Adenauer, were just as committed to a close relationship with the United States as he; given Europe’s dependence on the United States for its defence, they had to be. But whereas their priority was the drive towards European union, Churchill’s was the Commonwealth.⁸

Therein lay obvious scope for misunderstanding once work began on translating words into action. It was enhanced by the fact that men like Monnet thought in terms of structures with federalist potential while neither Churchill nor other Conservatives interested in Europe’s future ever sought to define what they had in mind. Macmillan, who was among the most active in what has been described as the Europeanist group, explained this in terms of continentals preferring to proceed on an a priori basis and the British preferring an a posteriori approach. But the difference was deeper than that. Churchill was clear in his rejection of anything that smacked of federalism, and there was no support for it among even the most Europeanist Conservatives.

In 1949, in a speech at a rally of the United Europe Movement, which he had himself founded two years earlier, Churchill set out his thinking in these words:

Britain is an integral part of Europe and we mean to play our part in the revival of her prosperity and greatness. But Britain cannot be thought of as a single state in isolation. She is the founder and centre of a worldwide Empire and Commonwealth. We shall never do anything to weaken the ties of blood, sentiment and tradition and common interests that unite us with members of the British family of nations.⁹

The movement was an all-party operation with Labour and Liberal members, but the balance was very much on the Conservative side, with several future Cabinet ministers, including Macmillan, Duncan Sandys (Churchill’s son-in-law), Peter Thorneycroft, and David Eccles, among its most active members. Other prominent Conservatives took care to signal their reservations, notably Eden, the former foreign secretary and Churchill’s heir apparent, and Rab Butler, who was in charge of the party’s policymaking. Many other Conservative MPs shared their misgivings, fearing that getting too close to Europe would weaken links with the Commonwealth.

On the continent, audiences did not pick up on the priority that Churchill attached to the Commonwealth connection when he spoke about Europe. It was his clarion calls for European reconciliation and unity that they heard. At Zurich in September 1946, in the speech mentioned above, just sixteen months after VE Day, he had created a sensation with his call for ‘a kind of United States of Europe’. This would, he explained, be based on a partnership between France and Germany: ‘The first step in the re-creation of the European family must be a partnership between France and Germany. In this way only can France recover the moral and cultural leadership of Europe. There can be no revival of Europe without a spiritually great France and spiritually great Germany.’¹⁰ Nothing did more to launch the concept of a united Europe as an objective to be worked towards, as distinct from the stuff of dreams, than this speech. The fact that it contained a paragraph stating that Britain and the Commonwealth would be facilitators and partners, along with the United States, rather than participants, was easily overlooked.

In the second of his two great 1940s European speeches at The Hague in 1948, Churchill rejoiced in the progress made towards the Zurich objective. In particular, he welcomed the recently agreed Charter of Human Rights, which owed much to the work of his Conservative colleague Sir David Maxwell Fyfe (later, as Lord Kilmuir, to become Lord Chancellor in Macmillan’s government), who went on to help bring the European Convention on Human Rights into being. He also blurred the distinction between Britain and the countries that would be involved in creating a united Europe. In a section describing his vision of a world government based on a number of groups, he saw ‘the vast Soviet Union forming one of these groups. The Council of Europe, including Great Britain with her Empire and Common-wealth would be another,’ and ‘the United States and her sister republics in the Western Hemisphere’ would be a third.¹¹

As a project designed to achieve European unity based on a partnership between France and Germany, the proposal to create the ECSC, launched by the French government in 1950, could be described as giving practical effect to Churchill’s call. As an explicitly supranational, or federalist, project, it was, however, fundamentally different from anything he would have put forward. It was the brainchild of Monnet, at that time in charge of the French Commissariat général du Plan, the central planning agency widely credited with playing a key role in France’s rapid post-war economic recovery.

From this vantage point Monnet foresaw that, although Germany was still under occupation by Britain, France, the United States, and the Soviet Union, its economy would in the long run again outstrip that of France and become the most powerful in Europe. He fe...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1. Missed Opportunities 1946–1959
• 2. Macmillan’s False Start 1959–1963
• 3. Heath’s Triumph and Tragedy 1963–1975
• 4. The 1975 Referendum – Before and After
• 5. Thatcher’s Battles 1979–1991
• 6. Things Fall Apart 1991–1997
• 7. Three Leaders 1997–2005
• 8. Cameron’s Dilemmas 2005–2016
• Conclusions
• Notes
• Acknowledgements
• Index