POLITICS
Europe is graven on John Major's heart.
Ken Clarke was one of the engravers
BRUCE ANDERSON
Ten days ago, Kenneth Clarke tried to help his party to win the next election. In a cautious way, a lot of voters are now per- suaded that prosperity has returned. Mr Clarke's shrewd, careful Budget was designed to reinforce that mood: Ken at his best. Since then, he has made up for it. The past few days have seen Ken at his worst, behaving as if he were determined to ensure that his party lost the next election.
Hardly anyone now believes that Britain would join a single currency in 1999. John Major has never thought that there was any likelihood of us doing so, and Ken Clarke himself now knows than there is no realistic prospect of British accession. There may not even be a single currency to join; the nearer the deadlines approach, the clearer it becomes that the project has not been thought through. Our Continental partners are good at aspirational rhetoric; they are much less good at detailed planning, at which the British civil service excels. The problems mount, economic and political. The single currency proposal resembles a splendid-looking parcel, which has been beautifully wrapped and ribboned: all most impressive, until you pick it up to take it to the post office, and it falls to bits.
The single currency does have formidable political momentum, which comes, of course, not from the peoples of Europe, but from the Euro-nomenldatura, headed by Chancellor Kohl, who both dom- inate and stifle public debate throughout most of the EU. But even if they get their way, the obstacles will have been ignored, not surmounted. The whole business could end in farce and chaos, with the Tower of Euro-Babel crashing down on its builders' heads. Those who think that we could just watch the fun from our safe seats on this side of the Channel should think again; the inevitable economic dislocation would hit our growth rates. But Sir Roy Denman, a former Commission official and a typical Euro-fanatic in that he appears to despise his own country, loses all credibility when he claims that the pound might devalue against the euro by 20 per cent. If the euro does hap- pen in 1999, it will not be a hard currency but a fudge currency. Sterling might appreciate against it, which would not help our exports.
A few years ago, when everyone assumed that a European currency would simply be a deutschmark surrounded by 12 stars, Sir Roy might have had a point. That was why Mr Major began to talk about sterling becoming the strongest currency in the EU. He wanted to assuage the fears of those who attributed Britain's reluctance to join the euro not to a desire for independence, but to an unwillingness to accept counter- inflationary discipline. It now seems much more likely that if there were a euro, the French would have achieved their objective of breaking the power of the Bundesbank. Sterling could then become the strongest currency in the EU, stronger than domestic monetary conditions would require.
All this provides a partial justification for the Government's refusal to rule out a sin- gle currency. There is a case for taking part in the negotiations, so that we can find out what the foreigners are up to and make contingency plans; we might even be able to persuade them to act more reasonably. But this is not a very strong case. The oth- ers would hardly be able to keep their preparations secret — and if they were to try, we learned from Phil Stephens's book on the politics of sterling that MI6 takes a close interest in the Bundesbank's delibera- tions. As for persuasion, there is no reason to suppose that they would take any notice of us. Whatever Ken Clarke might say, they know that we are not going to join — and if the constraints of reality do not force them to behave sensibly, it is hardly likely that British arguments would. That we are right and they are wrong would make no differ- ence. When a group of people is clinging to a collective fantasy, the fellow who tries to dispel it is always unpopular.
Anyway, it would not be necessary for Britain to declare an absolute rejection of a single currency. The Government could just set out terms and conditions which made it impossible, and reinforce them in background briefings. The British willing- ness to join the euro in 1999 could then resemble French membership of Nato under de Gaulle or Margaret Thatcher's commitment to EMU: a convenient fiction. This would also ensure that we could not be excluded from the talks — while the Tories would enjoy the electoral advan- tages of being the party most clearly in favour of a robust defence of British inter- ests — and freedoms — though remaining part of the EU. All that could have hap- pened, but Ken Clarke prevented it.
He did not do so in order to keep the option of joining the euro in 1999; he knows that there is no such option. He did so as part of a personal battle with the Tory Euro- sceptics which has come to obsess him and which is distorting his political judgment while destroying his political usefulness.
It is easy to see why Mr Clarke came to abominate some of the Eurosceps; so, at moments, has Mr Major. Some of them are impossible characters, endlessly self-indul- gent, who have spent the past five years doing their best to make the Tory Party ungovernable. Some of them are also intel- lectually dishonest; they pretend that they merely oppose federalism, when in reality they favour withdrawal.
That said, some of the Europhiles are every bit as self-indulgent as the worst of the Eurosceps — and most of them are far more intellectually dishonest. From the 1960s onwards, the Europhiles have consistently deceived the voters as to their true inten- tions. Ted Heath, Geoffrey Howe, Ken Clarke, Michael Heseltine, John Gummer, Leon Brittan: federalists to a man, but none of them prepared to make the intellectual case for their beliefs in a forthright manner. (The one possible exception is Ted Heath, but only after he left office. In the early Sev- enties, he was the worst offender of the lot.) Ken Clarke's recent briefings display the same characteristics. We are told that he is sticking to his position on the single curren- cy because he does not want to surrender the Tory Party to those who favour with- drawal from Europe. But most Eurosceps do not want to leave the EU. They still believe, with John Major, that there is a middle position between federalism and withdrawal. Extremists always hate middle positions: it sometimes seems as if there were a tacit conspiracy between Ken Clarke and Teddy Taylor to destroy the middle ground and with it the Tories' hopes of re- election.
Ken Clarke and others have never both- ered to make their case on Europe because they thought that as long as no one talked about it, they could somehow lull party and country into federalism. That was never going to happen, but Ken is a stubborn fel- low. If others wreck his illusions, he will wreck John Major's election campaign.
Mr Major recently paraphrased Mary I. When he died, he said, Europe would be found to be graven on his heart. One of the principal engravers was his Chancellor of the Exchequer.
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