EU Referendum


Booker: Boris tells it wrong


15/02/2015



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For two years, writes Booker, Lord Justice Munby, the head of our family courts, has been heroically fighting to restore some semblance of justice and common sense to our horribly secretive and corrupted "child protection" system.

And so starts yet another report on this ongoing scandal, about which he has been reporting since 2009, with the latest distressing narrative unfolding as his lead.

Then, for his second story , Booker takes on Boris Johnson and his recent book, The Churchill Factor. A stunning tour de force, Booker says, but for one essay which stands apart from all the rest. 

This is not just "historically all at sea" but seems to be playing a very devious game in trying to fuzz over Churchill’s position on the post-war unification of Europe. He completely ignores the rivalry between the two key competing forces in those years.

On one hand there was the "intergovernmental" path represented by the Council of Europe, the creation of which Churchill presided over at a huge conference in the Hague in 1948 (Johnson doesn't even mention it).

But opposed to this was the drive, masterminded by Jean Monnet, to give Europe a "supranational" government, designed, by way of a "Common Market", to lead eventually to the European Union.

Why, Booker asks, does Johnson try to pretend, against all the evidence, that Churchill might have wanted Britain to join in with Monnet's supranational project?

Why, in quoting Churchill's Albert Hall speech in 1947, does he omit the crucial passage in which Churchill made clear that, while supporting Europe's political integration, he saw no direct part in it for Britain with its "Empire and Commonwealth"?

This was a position he had eloquently stated as far back as 1930, when there was first serious talk about creating a "United States of Europe". Johnson even betrays his ignorance by suggesting that Churchill was first to coin this already familiar phrase.

But, if anything, Booker is being too gentle. Johnson, for instance, quotes from the Parliamentary debate of 27 June 1950, on the Schuman Plan, but he omits any the key part of it which demonstrates, without the slightest hint of ambiguity, that Churchill was opposed to the plan.

As leader of the opposition, Churchill was complaining of the refusal of the Attlee government to attend the meeting convened to discuss the plan, saying that a British representative could attend without committing us to anything. And in this extract, he says:
It is simply darkening counsel to pretend … that by participating in the discussion, under the safeguards and reservations I have read, we could have been committed against our will to anything of this nature. I would add, to make my answer quite clear to the right hon. and learned Gentleman, that if he asked me, "Would you agree to a supranational authority which has the power to tell Great Britain not to cut any more coal or make any more steel, but to grow tomatoes instead?" I should say, without hesitation, the answer is "no". But why not be there to give the answer?
This could not be more clear. As to whether he would agree to a supranational authority, Churchill affirms that he would say: "without hesitation", the answer is "no".

Boris Johnson is the man who would have us believe that he is a sometime "eurosceptic". Yet, as Booker remarks, he has never shown any real sign of engaging with the true nature of the "European project", as he demonstrated again last week with his puerile call for Britain to hold a referendum even more implausibly soon than the one David Cameron promises to give us by 2017.

As an entertainingly readable journalist Johnson may score high marks. But as a serious politician who does his homework, a serious fail.