An occasional article in a series of Tory rapprochement with Europe. I know Tories in Brussels who hate Europe and what it stands for; but are they being let down by those back at base. I will be monitoring these developments both in the UK and London and will be bringing them to you.
There was a revealing moment on Newsnight, Britain's premier news programme, last week.
An inexperienced Labour environment minister had just been skewered in an interview which recognised that global warming was the planet's biggest problem but that only a tenth had been spent on combating climate change in the last five years compared to fighting the "global war on terror", a "war" whose utility and effectiveness has increasingly been questioned across the political spectrum in Britain.
As the sombre statistics about global climate change were being digested - we have only ten years before the barrel rolls irrevocably over the falls - the next segment cut to the annual opposition Tory party conference, held last week. You might have expected there to have been a thematic followup; but no, the chief item was a distasteful chase of the higher education minister and former Brussels correspondent Boris Johnson to try and make Mr former straight bananas to come up with a witty quip, or "gaffe" for the TV cameras. There is a point when adulation and persecution become almost indistinguishable, and Johnson was filmed being chased into the press centre; when he emerged, his hair a characteristic haystack, he was pursued by literally dozens of hacks and hackettes tape recorders and mikes aloft down the Bournemouth promenade. "We need you, Boris, we don't have a story, nothing happened today" shrieked one. No wonder the Beatles stopped touring in 1966. One of the most intelligent and congenial men in British politics, and a true free thinker, often grotesquely caricatured as a clown, looked close to tears.
The Newsnight piece, barely protected by knowing self irony, rather reinforced the point the pug-eared environment minister, who looked as if he has been born after Kyoto, made that finally shut interviewer Jeremy Paxman up: "We are all in this together." A media focusing in trivialities rather than the biggest issue of our time is part of the problem. Britain's opposition party had spent half a day on debates discussing the environment. Newsnight is the most serious programme on British television. There was more - much more - coverage of Boris on the BBC news website the next day
A Tory conference is not usually a place where a pro European can feel the atmosphere congenial. And the new Tory's party's headbangers, or, as they have been named, British Neocons, certainly behave with the usual slavering atlanticism; acting, as someone put it, quoting Leon Blum on the 1930s French communist party, as a "nationalist party - but someone else’s nationalist party."
But it would be misleading to think they are any longer dominant. For the good news is, the new leader of the party - David Cameron - might actually want and need to get closer to Europe.
Yes, stop press.
What's more, he has the support of a headbanger of yore, the formidably intelligent former party leader but now shadow foreign secretary, William Hague.
The reason? Cameron has seen the truth, even as most of the media hasn't: seen the ice shelves the size of Belgium shedding into the South Antarctic sea. The bare summit of Kilimanjaro whose giant snowcaps just thirty years ago provided a picturesque backdrops to photographs of big game hunters: the sieved Greenland icecap dotted with as many holes as a slab of ice on a warm March day. The satellite pictures that show that half the North Pole ice has gone already, and that it will be possible to sail to the end point of the compass on warm breeze by 2030. He also knows that the US administration is run by fanatically un-empirical former oil executives denying global warming and fighting wars to secure US energy interests abroad for America's enormously wasteful industry and transport capacity.
Where else to turn?
I urge you to consider Hague's speech on foreign affairs on Tuesday. This was very skilful speech. On the surface this was red meat, pressing all the buttons of the bingo hall audience of over sixties that dominate Tory conventions.
"We need to be able to make much more of a body Labour ministers hardly ever mention: the Commonwealth." He talked about confronting terrorism, Iran, and, a "resolve to defeat terrorists whose murder of innocent civilians can never be defended or excused." He spent seven long minutes, half the speech, criticising Europe, for laughs, making easy jokes about Blair's British presidency. "The British people believe integration has gone far enough and so do we." But listen more closely and read the speech and you find that - he does not exclude a new constitution, albeit subject to a referendum and with the justice and home affairs veto abolition removed.
And when you realise that the only foreign politician he has mentioned by name is the Czech MEP Jan Zahradil, with whom he hopes to form a party in the European parliament, and listen to the remark that he wants to "give leadership to a European Union in crisis it so desperately needs" and you realised that - with its six minutes, partly devoted to urging abstruse institutional changes - Europe is indeed that single part of the world where Britain wants to spend the next few years constructing a relationship. The US he but mentioned, briefly, twice.
Now, I urge you to consider Cameron's speech. It was spoken under the party's new logo of a scribbled oak tree (old symbol: a hand holding a torch: the struggles of the Thatcher years) in a conference centre bedecked by a picture backdrop of greenery and trees. There was even a juice bar. A fifty minute long speech ticking off various policy areas gave rise to disparate headlines; but he really did spell it out in his summary the big theme: "NHS, society, family and the environment." He gave praise to the Al Gore film on climate change which was shown to delegates earlier in the week, and to strengthen his credentials he rolled out that cartoon opponent Norman Tebbit who supposedly over dinner told him that "I though you were green and lean" but "now I realise you are green, lean and mean."
In the media coverage that followed, some focused on the NHS pledge, others on the embrace of Mauslim communities, the critique of US's activities in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. Reporters said he pledged to offer substance rather than spin, and so on. Very heterogenous.
Only two commentators saw Europe and/or singled out the real seriousness of heart about the green theme. Jonathan Freedland ofo the Guardian said that this would be an opportunity for Gordon Brown to split the party between the euro-sceptics and those who realised that a supranational grouping of nations is – and will continue to be – the only way to effect the collective action needed to bring down carbon emissions. .
Martin Kettle of the Guardian focused on the Hague speech: “Hague managed with considerable oratorical legerdemain to promote a policy of renewed Conservative re-engagement within the EU without frightening the conference into one of its all too instinctive displays of Europhobia.”
“I waited for the hisses, the boos, the shouts of disagreement that that remark might so easily have provoked in a less skilfully prepared speech. But nothing came. And in the silence, Hague leaped across to dry political land, with an assertion that "our place is to be in Europe but not run by Europe." Another skilful touch, that. It sounded like an anti-EU remark, when in fact it was the opposite, a commitment to Tory participation in the EU.”
It wiwll be interesting to see how the Tories now propose working with the EU in order to fight their big campaign issue - and whether this will extend to other areas. Also, whether the commission will take note.
