Incident at Birch Grove
Yet it was Britain’s post-war relationship with Europe, not the fate of the Empire, immigration or the Cold War, which produced some of the deepest cracks in British public life. Why should that be? This was not of prime importance to the people of the country, certainly no more so than the cost of living or the building of a multiculture. What gave it added importance in the corridors and lobbies of the Palace of Westminster was that ‘Europe’ was about them – the importance of MPs and ministers, of mandarins and ambassadors. Britain was fading as head of the Commonwealth and had little leverage with the Washington of Eisenhower and Kennedy. Joining the European Economic Community would either (depending on your point of view) give Britain’s elite a new, well-appointed and large theatre to try to dominate; or it might push them aside in a Babel of competing and alien politicians. By the late fifties, this choice was becoming urgent. The distant echoes ignored by Attlee and Churchill had become a deafening proposition. Across the channel, they had had the builders in.
After the iron and coal community, which the Durham miners were supposed to have been so against, the six founding EU nations – France, West Germany, Italy, Luxembourg, Belgium and the Netherlands – had kept designing and laying out bigger structures. The European Defence Community had foundered. But in 1955 a breakthrough had happened in the unlikely setting of a small and undistinguished coastal town in Sicily called Messina. Here the foreign ministers of ‘the Six’ had agreed to move towards a customs union, and combine in transport, atomic know-how and energy policy. The driving force behind this was a squat, pro-British Belgian now formally revered as a European founding father, called Paul-Henri Spaak. Later, he stolidly recalled how the ministers had worked through the night to complete the proposal: ‘The sun was rising over Mount Etna as we returned to our rooms, tired but happy. Far-reaching decisions had been taken.’ The first view from London was that, at any rate, Etna had not erupted. As the negotiations continued in Brussels about what would eventually become the EU, Britain refused to send a minister to take part, choosing instead a formidably bright but middle-ranking civil servant, a trade economist called Russell Bretherton.
This fox-like little man with a clipped moustache soon realized two things: he was being treated like a very important person by the Europeans and, second, they were deadly serious about trying to build a new political system. Bretherton was regarded by the French, Belgians and Germans as national negotiator when in truth he was a mere observer with written notes about what he could and could not say. In the mythology of the European Union, there is a wonderful story about Bretherton. It tells us that at the end of the negotiations this starchy representative of Her Britannic Majesty stood up and informed the room: ‘Gentlemen, you are trying to negotiate something you will never be able to negotiate. But if negotiated, it will not be ratified. And if ratified, it will not work.’ He is then supposed to have walked out, no doubt clutching his rolled umbrella. Sadly, it seems unlikely that this ever happened as reported, though it has poetic truth. The continental negotiators were disappointed and shocked by Britain’s lack of serious interest and Bretherton had been given a loftily dismissive brief by his political masters; it was simply less crisp than myth tells us. At any rate the Six shrugged off Britain’s attitude. They were still rebuilding shattered cities and healing torn economies, and for them the coming Union was manifest destiny. The Treaty of Rome duly followed in 1957. Coming so soon after the humiliation of Suez it was greeted by increasingly agitated head-scratching in Whitehall.
And for Britain, the world was differently shaped. The Commonwealth then meant more than a worthy outreach programme for the Royal Family. Its food and raw materials poured into Britain and there was an illusion that Britain’s manufacturing future would be secured by selling industrial goods to kith and kin in Durban, Dunedin, Canberra and Calgary. In came butter, oil, meat, aluminium, rubber, tobacco and woodpulp. Out would flow engines, cars, clothing, aircraft and electronics. The poorer members of the sterling club kept their reserves in London, so Britain was banker as well as manufacturer for much of Africa and parts of Asia too. Most people believed that to cut adrift the Commonwealth and join a new club would be economically ruinous as well as immoral. For Labour, Wilson told the Commons that ‘If there has to be a choice, we are not entitled to sell our friends and kinsmen down the river for a problematical and marginal advantage in selling washing machines in Dusseldorf.’ Later Hugh Gaitskell told the Labour conference that membership of the European Economic Community would mean the end of a thousand years of history: ‘How can one seriously suppose that if the mother country, the centre of the Commonwealth, is a province of Europe…it could continue to exist as the mother country of a series of independent nations?’ Yet at just this time the European market, thirsting for new consumer goods, was growing spectacularly fast, while the Commonwealth trading group was by comparison falling behind. As we have seen, most of the poorer countries did not want Britain anyway. The richer nations of the old Commonwealth – Australia, New Zealand, Canada and even semi-detached South Africa – would soon turn to the United States for their consumer goods. Rileys would not long compete with Cadillacs.
Yet membership of the EEC would subordinate Britain in important ways to foreigners. This was recognized from the first. There was no illusion. Independence would be lost. Other forms of subordination and loss of independence had already happened. The foundation of the United Nations, the post-war economic system and the establishment of Nato involved relinquishing traditional freedoms of action. Those could be painful, as Suez and the various financial crises had been. Yet there seemed to be good military and security reasons there. Europe was something different. Those who had looked clearly at the Treaty of Rome were struck by its overwhelming ambition. Lord Kilmuir, Harold Macmillan’s Lord Chancellor, told him that Parliament would lose powers to the Council of Ministers whose majority vote could change British law; that the Crown’s power over treaties would partly shift to Brussels and that British courts would find themselves in part subordinate to the European Court of Justice. He made it all clear in later parliamentary debates though this truth was hardly rammed home to the millions outside the world of high politics. Macmillan himself tended to obscure it in windily reassuring words, the old actor-manager trying to keep the whole theatre happy; but Kilmuir spoke out and so did Lord Home, the future Prime Minister.
Had Britain been involved from the start as even the French wanted, the EEC, eventually the EU, would have developed differently. There would certainly have been less emphasis on agricultural protection and more on free trade. ‘Europe’ might have been a little less mystical and a little more open, perhaps more democratic, though this is difficult in so many languages. At any rate, the moment passed. Even after the shock and humiliation of Suez, the Commonwealth and relations with the Americans took precedence for London. The struggle to keep in the nuclear race meant private deals with Washington which infuriated Paris. After the Treaty of Rome took effect at the beginning of 1958, French attitudes hardened. General de Gaulle, who had felt humiliated by Churchill during the war, returned as President of France, too late to stop the new European system which he had opposed on traditional nationalistic grounds, and therefore determined that it should at least be dominated by France. In the words of diplomats and journalists at the time there could not be two cocks on the dunghill.
Macmillan, always a keen Europeanist, became worried. Various British plots intended to limit the Six and hamper their project had failed. London had tried to rival the new Common Market with a grouping of the excluded countries, Britain, Austria, Denmark, Portugal, Norway, Switzerland and Sweden, calling it the European Free Trade Association (EFTA) or ‘the Seven’. This was a poor arithmetical point, since the Seven had a smaller population than the Six, were geographically scattered and far less determined. EFTA was a petulant minuet of the wallflowers. Roy Jenkins, always an ardent pro-European, described it as ‘a foolish attempt to organise a weak periphery against a strong core’. By 1959 Macmillan was worrying that ‘for the first time since the Napoleonic era, the major continental powers are united in a positive economic grouping, with considerable political aspects’ which might cut Britain out of Europe’s main markets and decisions. Soon in his diaries he was sounding even more alarmed, talking of ‘a boastful, powerful “Empire of Charlemagne” – now under French, but bound to come under German, control’. There was much self-deception about the possible deal that could be struck. Macmillan’s team, centred on Edward Heath, hoped that somehow the trading system of the Commonwealth supporting English-speaking farmers across the world could be accommodated by the protectionist system of Europe. They seem to have thought that any loss of sovereignty would be tolerable if this deal could be struck. Macmillan might have seemed as safely steeped in tradition as country houses and the novels of Trollope but he had nothing like the almost spiritual reverence for the House of Commons felt by Enoch Powell or, on the other side of politics, Gaitskell.
In the early Sixties the battle over Britain’s coming loss of sovereignty was postponed because British entry was blocked – brutally, publicly and ruthlessly. Two scenes tell the story. The first occurred in November 1961 at Birch Grove, Macmillan’s country house in Sussex, a substantial pile with stunning views to the South Downs. De Gaulle was due to come to Britain for talks and told the Prime Minister that, rather than visit Downing Street, he would prefer to come to his private home, two old comrades together. And they were in some ways old friends. During the war, as the leading British minister in North Africa, Macmillan had been crucial in helping de Gaulle through an immense crisis. De Gaulle, leader of the Free French, was struggling to dominate the coming government-in-exile which would take power in France after its liberation. His opponent was a right-wing general who had tolerated pro-Vichy allies but de Gaulle’s arrogance and refusal to compromise with him so infuriated Roosevelt and Churchill that they wanted him kicked out of the exiled administration. Macmillan, realizing de Gaulle’s huge potential, had worked frantically to soften Churchill and to shore up the general’s position. De Gaulle was grateful to Macmillan personally but he left North Africa more than ever convinced of the danger to France of a coming Anglo-American alliance which would try to dominate the world.
This was the background to his arrival in Sussex, one of the oddest summits in Franco-British history. To the annoyance of local gamekeepers and farmers, the woods surrounding Birch Grove had been filled with French and British police and their dogs though, to the Prime Minister’s delight, one of the Alsatians did bite a Daily Mail reporter on the bottom. Lady Dorothy, Macmillan’s wife, had been warned by the Foreign Office that she would have to find space in the fridge for the French President’s blood since he travelled with a stock for transfusion in case of an attempted assassination. Mrs Bell, the family cook, then refused to have it in the kitchen fridge which was ‘full of haddock and all sorts of things for tomorrow’; another fridge was set up in a squash court. When the talking finally started, the two leaders were interrupted by an angry gamekeeper, who protested that the police dogs were ruining the prospects for shooting that weekend. De Gaulle was perplexed, Macmillan hugely amused. After apologizing to the gamekeeper, they exchanged blunt views. Macmillan argued that European civilization was threatened from all sides and that if Britain was not allowed to join the Common Market, he would have to review everything, including keeping British troops in Germany. If de Gaulle wanted an ‘empire of Charlemagne’ it would be on its own. The French President replied that he didn’t want Britain to bring in its ‘great escort’ of Commonwealth countries – the Canadians and Australians were no longer Europeans; Indian and African countries had no place in a European system; and he feared Europe being ‘drowned in the Atlantic’. In short, he simply did not believe that Britain would ditch its old empire; and if it did, he thought it would be a Trojan horse for the Americans.
These seem formidable objections, points of principle that should have been seen as a clear warning. Yet the detailed and exhaustive talks about British entry chugged along despite them. Edward Heath clocked up sixty-three visits to Brussels, Paris and other capitals, covering 50,000 miles as he haggled and argued. But by then Macmillan was a fast-fading figure. A natural intriguer who had risen to power on the bloodied back of Eden, he was obsessed by possible political coups against himself, and increasingly (and rightly) worried about the weak state of the economy. He was failing in Europe and looked old when seen with the dapper young President Kennedy.
After an unpopular budget Macmillan drafted an alternative policy based on more planning, and decided to sack his Chancellor, a close friend, Selwyn Lloyd. The news was leaked to the papers, and over a brutal and panicky twenty-four hours in July 1962 Macmillan expanded the circle of his sackings ever more widely, removing a third of his cabinet ministers from their jobs without notice. In what became known as ‘the Night of the Long Knives’ Macmillan called in and dismissed a succession of bewildered, then outraged, colleagues. One protested that his cook would have been given more notice. Macmillan’s official biographer described it as ‘an act of carnage unprecedented in British political history’. The press portrayed him as a somewhat crazed executioner. In the Commons Jeremy Thorpe, the Liberal leader, told him, ‘greater love hath no man than this, that he lays down his friends for his life.’ The reaction seems odd decades on, when ruthless cabinet reshuffles have happened so often, though never again on this scale. Many of those sacked deserved to lose their jobs and Macmillan, far from relishing the butchery, found it made him vomit. But it was the final failure of sangfroid.
In November, Macmillan returned to his argument with de Gaulle, this time in the grand château of Rambouillet, a Renaissance confection south of Paris which has been used by French presidents for scores of summits, as well as summer holidays. The circumstances were almost as odd as at Birch Grove and again centred on the issue of pheasant shooting. Though de Gaulle did not shoot himself, he organized a fairly comprehensive welcoming slaughter, standing behind Macmillan and other guests and commenting loudly every time they missed. There was much use of trumpets and the beaters were soldiers; Macmillan shot seventy-seven birds. But now, on his home turf de Gaulle’s objections to British membership were even more aggressively expressed. If Britain wanted to choose Europe, she would have to cut her special ties with America. At one point, Macmillan broke down in tears of frustration at the Frenchman’s intransigence, leading de Gaulle to report cruelly to his cabinet later: ‘This poor man, to whom I had nothing to give, seemed so sad, so beaten that I wanted to put my hand on his shoulder and say to him, as in the Edith Piaf song, “Ne pleurez pas, milord”.’
Cruel or not, it was a significant moment for Macmillan, for the Tories and for Britain. The Edwardian act now seemed weak and old, not impressive. When a few months later, in early 1963, de Gaulle’s ‘Non’ was abruptly announced in a Paris press conference, causing huge offence in Britain. A visit by Princess Margaret to Paris was cancelled. At the England-France rugby international at Twickenham a few days later, England won six-five and the captain assured Heath, the failed negotiator, that he had had a word with the team and told them ‘this was an all-important game. Everyone knew what I meant and produced the necessary.’ Macmillan himself bitterly recorded in his diary that ‘the French always betray you in the end.’