The real story of Brexit

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• Tom McTague’s latest book charts Britain’s turbulent relationship with Europe

• Since the 1940s, successive governments have failed to realise how seriously the Europeans took federalism

• Our future relationship with Europe will likely look like our past – confused

I am a man (well, boy) with many awful habits. I bite my fingernails. I forget to make my bed. I file copy desperately close to deadlines, don’t brush my hair and haven’t called my grandmother half as many times as I should have done. But among all these egregious Atkinson sins, there is one that brings me the greatest amount of shame, pain, and distress: my unfailing ability, when CapX come a-calling for my summer or winter reads, to forget every book that I am reading or have read that year.

As such, when I began reading ‘Between the Waves’ – Tom McTague’s marvellous new history of Britain’s post-war relationship with Europe – I resolved that I would review it immediately, before its insights had washed from my mind like a sandcastle confronted by the titular ocean movement.

Beginning in Algiers on New Year’s Day 1943 and charting Britain’s course both into and then out of what would become the European Union, McTague’s history follows successive generations of politicians as they grapple with, become confused by and then fudge our relationship with Brussels. The central problem always remains the same. Britain is part of Europe, but semi-detached. Through geography and history – primarily our imperial interests and legacies, and our separate experience of the Second World War – we have been unable to fully embrace Jean Monnet’s European dream.  

McTague begins in Algiers due to the presence there of four men who would go on to shape Europe’s future and Britain’s attitude to it. Monnet, the French civil servant and financier turned ‘Father of Europe’; Charles de Gaulle, the radio host with a certain idea of himself; Harold MacMillan, the one-time Oswald Mosely fan, who would become the poster-boy for Tory wets; and Enoch Powell, the first and greatest Eurosceptic, whose standard now flutters with renewed vigour.

By using these men as the springboard for this narrative, McTague makes clear that this is a book that takes politics as practiced in the traditional Peterhouse sense, charting the 50 or so politicians in conscious tension with each other who mattered on Britain and the continent at any one time. But it also takes seriously the ideas that motivated them, like Powell’s desire to create a British nation out of the remains of the empire of which he had once dreamed, or de Gaulle’s hope to shape a European France that could be a counterweight to the Russians and the Americans – plus ca change, and all that.

So often, ‘Europe’ became the answer to national humiliations: to prevent another war for the Germans or the French, or to provide a global role to a British political class unused to the shrunken post-imperial stage, a lifeboat into which a country battered by stagflation and relative decline could clamber. But as McTague highlights, Common Market membership was not as transformative as some proponents hoped – just as our exit brought neither the apocalypse or triumph that the more starry-eyed Leavers and Remainers suggested in 2016. The fault has never been in Brussels, but ourselves.  

Yet while McTague’s history is a squarely political one, that definition is broad, with philosophers, historians, businessmen, columnists and OUCA hacks taking their place beside the Prime Ministers. McTague captures not only the reality of power – the ability to influence the course of events, both politically and intellectually – but that power, so often, does not correspond with formal titles. That some of the names that recur in the chapters on the growing Euroscepticism among young Tories of the 80s and 90s now frequent my WhatsApp is a reassuring sign I have chosen my mentors well.

As McTague makes clear, the central problem in Britain’s relationship with the developments across the Channel was the inability of successive governments to realise that the Europeans took federalism seriously. We assumed this was a pragmatic enterprise for mutual enrichment, not an attempt to create a new continent out of two world wars. We always thought we could negotiate ourselves a special relationship, blinding ourselves to the consequences for our sovereignty.

The politician who did so with the greatest prescience and clarity was, of course, Enoch Powell. McTague’s exploration of his intellectual journey is both gripping and invigorating. Although some Eurosceptics – post ‘Rivers of Blood’ – were coy in admitting their debt to Powell, McTague makes clear that they were all, ultimately, in his shadow. Leaving the European Union has forced us to confront again his central challenge: what makes the British nation?

In was in the context of Britain’s relationship with Europe that Powell’s example influenced previous cohorts of young right-wingers. But for the coming generation, the radicalising experience has not been the growth of a European superstate, but Covid and the ‘Boriswave’ of migration that followed. Today’s young Right are rather unbothered by Europe. That was yesterday’s fight. They are much more exercised about immigration – and far less coy about hiding their lodestars.

As McTague’s book makes clear, our relationship with the European Union will never be permanently settled. As Nick Thomas-Symonds goes back and forth to Brussels, hoping to take us back into those areas his Tory predecessors took us out of, it becomes clear that our future, in one respect, looks much like our past: one long negotiation, never fully out, but never able to fully embrace going in.

But it is also clear that Brexit is no longer the central issue of our politics. With memories of the tortuous process of our exit still fresh, it is unlikely that voters would look kindly upon any attempt to wave the bloody shirt, whether from ‘Remoaners’ or ‘Brexiteers’. A referendum on our membership of the European Convention of Human Rights is a prospect that fills even this arch-sceptic with dread. Besides: with Brussels removed as a bogeyman, our own dysfunctionality has become clear. McTague’s book therefore acts as a timely close on one era, and a spur to action into the next.

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