EUROPEAN DEMANDS
Three years earlier David Cameron, as Conservative prime minister, rashly promised in a speech at Bloomberg’s London headquarters that he would call a referendum on EU membership by 2017. A week on, I had lunch with the then-governor of the Bank of England.
Mervyn King, who later astonished everybody by emerging as a Brexiter, said several things which today seem pertinent. First, he suggested it was foolish of Cameron – for tactical reasons to quell right-wing dissent within his own party – to promise a referendum by 2017, “because by that date I do not believe we shall know what sort of Europe we are being asked to stay in, or to leave.”
King did not believe that the northern and southern European nations could indefinitely remain within the euro, because of the absence of economic convergence. But a breach could be delayed a long time, he argued, certainly beyond 2017. Then he made a remark about our EU partners which has proved spot on: “If we are the ones to break up the party, they will punish us.”
So they have. At every turn since 2016, the Europeans have demanded brutal terms for any concession to British attempts to reclaim bits of EU membership that suit our interests. Who can blame them? By leaving, we inflicted the gravest blow that the bloc’s ambitions have suffered since its inception.
Cameron was foolish, in the three-year interval between promising a referendum and holding it, not to pursue a hearts-and-minds campaign both with the British people and the Europeans. My compatriots had to be warned again and again that it was suicidal for a medium-sized nation such as ours to turn away from integration, to raise trade barriers.
Even more important, our partners needed to be told what we wanted, in order to stay. A senior Foreign Office official told me in 2015: “Every European government wants Britain in, and is waiting to hear our terms for remaining. But all they get from London is silence.”
Cameron and his Foreign Secretary William Hague pursued a policy of omerta, seeking to suppress a Tory civil war by saying nothing significant to or about Europe.
