Down the Rabbit Hole

What was​ Nigel Farage before he was Reform UK, before he was the Brexit Party, before he was Ukip? Farage insists that he started out as a run-of-the-mill Tory – just another true-blue Thatcherite – until the Conservative Party’s craven attitude towards Europe made it impossible for him to keep the faith. Recollections vary, however. According to Michael Crick’s biography from 2022, some of his fellow pupils at Dulwich College remember the young Nigel being more hard-right than centre-right, closer to the National Front than he was even to the outer fringes of the Tory mainstream. They say he was a teenage racist. He says it was all schoolboy high jinks. Given that this was the late 1970s, it is unlikely anyone will be able to prove anything. But we do know where Farage went politically at the end of the 1980s when he decided he could no longer vote Conservative. In the 1989 elections to the European Parliament Farage cast around for a party that sufficiently reflected his growing opposition to Britain’s membership of the European Economic Community. He ended up voting for the Greens.

Farage going Green is just one of many moments in Tom McTague’s mesmerising account of the backstory to Britain’s eventual exit from the EU that capture the capacity of the European question to make a mockery of British politics. Sometimes the interplay between fragile party allegiances and European obsessions produced results that were downright surreal. Before the 1997 general election, the Times – under the editorship of Peter Stothard and by this point driven almost mad by its antagonism towards Europe and its commensurate contempt for John Major – refused to endorse a party and instead chose to support whichever candidate was the most Eurosceptic in each constituency. The result was that the Times encouraged its readers to vote for Jeremy Corbyn in Islington. For much of its history it had been a newspaper with a profound suspicion of Irish nationalism in general and Sinn Féin in particular. No one in the British Parliament was closer to Sinn Féin than Corbyn. But who cared about any of that when Britain had been duped by its perfidious leaders into agreeing to the terms of the Maastricht Treaty?

The definitive example of party politics going out of the window where Europe is concerned came in 1974, when Enoch Powell finally broke with the Conservative Party he had spent most of his adult life hoping to lead. In the first general election of that year, Powell refused to back Edward Heath, the prime minister who had successfully negotiated Britain’s entry into the EEC. Both Powell and Heath concluded that the former’s lack of support cost the latter his job. In the second election of 1974, Powell went further and effectively told people to vote Labour, at that time by far the more Eurosceptic of the two main parties. Powell himself stood as a candidate for the Ulster Unionists and was returned for the seat of South Down. One result of that decision was to make Powell ineligible to enter the Conservative leadership race in 1975, when Thatcher defeated Heath, a contest Powell might well have won. Had he done so, we would now be living in a different country. Then again, had he been a Conservative in 1975 there might well not have been a vacancy, as by Powell’s own reckoning Heath would still have been squatting in Downing Street.

But it wasn’t just individual politicians who went through the looking-glass and back again over the question of Europe. Entire parties were doing the same. The idea of Farage once backing the Greens seems outlandish not just because he is currently the scourge of net zero targets but because the Greens have become passionate advocates of closer European ties. In the 1987 general election, the Green Party manifesto cast the EEC, along with Nato, as part of a supranational conspiracy to prevent national governments from following their own path on environmental policies. Now most Greens think reactionary national governments are the barrier to international co-operation on climate change. In the 1975 referendum on British membership of the EEC, the SNP were as keen on getting out as anyone: they saw European integration as a plot against the idea of national independence. In the 2014 referendum on Scottish independence, the SNP made membership of the EU central to their pitch: Europe had become a safe haven for smaller nations looking to make their way in the world. From 1945 to 1970, the Labour Party’s mission was to prevent the Tories from dragging Britain into the European quagmire, which was seen as a bosses’ club to keep the workers down. From 1990 to 2015, the Labour Party was just as determined to get Britain far enough into Europe – now seen as a site of social solidarity in the face of the ravages of Thatcherism – that the Tories wouldn’t be able to drag it out. For the two decades in between it was Labour, not the Conservatives, that nearly tore itself apart over the issue. The party’s turnaround has made some of its earlier positions appear almost unrecognisable. Who, for instance, said the following in 1962 of Harold Macmillan’s stated wish to make Britain a member of the European institutions that had been created by the Treaty of Rome? ‘We must be clear: it does mean, if this is the idea, the end of Britain as an independent European state. I make no apology for repeating it. It means the end of a thousand years of history.’ It sounds like the mystical patriot Powell. It was in fact the eminently sensible Labour leader Hugh Gaitskell.

Even so, it is Powell who best embodies the dynamics at work in this era of switchback politics. He believed in an idea of the nation that transcended the prosaic business of merely getting elected. That’s why he had relatively few qualms about swapping sides. What were a few decades of partisan loyalty compared to centuries of shared history? McTague takes his title from T.S. Eliot’s ‘Little Gidding’ (‘At the source of the longest river/The voice of the hidden waterfall/And the children in the apple tree/Not known, because not looked for/But heard, half-heard, in the stillness/Between two waves of the sea’), a poem that captures a certain idea of England. It speaks to that sense of historical continuity beyond the petty preoccupations of the present, which Powell felt certain the European project of Britain’s grabby politicians must ultimately betray:

We are born with the dead
See, they return, and bring us with them.
The moment of the rose and the moment of the yew tree
Are of equal duration. A people without history
Is not redeemed from time, for history is a pattern
Of timeless moments. So, while the light fails
On a winter’s afternoon, in a secluded chapel
History is now and England.

Seen from this perspective, the bureaucratic institutions and technocratic ambitions of, first, the European Coal and Steel Community, then the EEC, then the EC, then the EU, were bound to appear like fleeting shadows. They were not what really mattered and should be pushed aside. The irony is that in making this argument Powell helped turn Britain’s relationship with Europe into an all-consuming struggle for the soul of the body politic. Nothing became more frightening than the idea that the shadow play might be the new reality. So the things that didn’t matter became all that mattered. And British politics went down the rabbit hole.

But although the arc of Powell’s career shows what a mess the politics of timeless moments can make of the politics of the here and now, it cannot explain why the mismatch became so pervasive. Powell had his followers on Europe but they were in a minority during his lifetime, even within the Conservative Party. His hold over the wider public stemmed from his views on immigration, which was not an issue that intersected much if at all with the European question until relatively recently. In Powell’s heyday, the movement of people was a Commonwealth concern; Europe was about the movement of goods. Powell could pose as a popular tribune on matters of race; his views about national sovereignty were neither here nor there, as evidenced by the fact that they did little to sway the outcome of the 1975 referendum. What then gave Europe the power to play havoc with so many political fortunes? The answer must lie in the middle space between Powell’s thousand-year stare and the day-to-day business of trying to win elections. It was neither transcendental nor was it accidental. It was structural.

McTague thinks part of the explanation can be found in the persistence of an illusion among Britain’s political elites that only the shock of the Brexit referendum could dispel. From the advent of the European project in 1950, British politicians on all sides believed that it should be possible for the country to take advantage of greater European integration without being beholden to it. From Macmillan to Wilson to Heath to Thatcher to Major to Blair to Cameron, a succession of prime ministers persuaded themselves that their country was somehow different from the rest: it could pick and choose from the menu of European options in the way that suited it best. They were all mistaken. Some picking and choosing was possible but not over the fundamentals. What they cast as negotiating positions too often turned out to be rigid commitments from which they could not retreat. These politicians discovered that they would have to choose between the alternatives they had hoped to fudge. By the time that happened their careers were usually over, and being forced to choose was what had finished them.

Why did the belief in British exceptionalism persist? Some of it could be put down to delusions of grandeur. There was a feeling that Europe needed us more than we needed them. It is true that the architects of what eventually became the EU were quite conscious that without British involvement they risked simply repeating the mistakes of the past. In an interview with Fortune magazine in 1944, where he laid out his ideas for a newly integrated Europe after the war, Jean Monnet addressed what he called the biggest question of all: ‘Could England be brought in? For without England … the concept of a unified Europe turns all too quickly into a Germanised Europe all over again.’ But knowing that Britain was wanted as a counterweight to deal with fears of a German revival made British politicians believe they could call the shots. That was a fatal error. To start with, they decided it was best to steer clear altogether because a country with an intact empire was not going to be hurried along by the anxious impatience of its weaker neighbours. By the time Britain decided it was in its interests to join, a different logic had taken hold. Without British involvement, the French had concluded that the only way to contain Germany was to go further and faster in binding the nations of Europe together. McTague calls it ‘the eternal paradox – or genius – of European integration: to manage Germany’s core economic strength, it must be Europeanised; but by Europeanising Germany, Germany continues to grow stronger, requiring ever more European integration.’ So when Britain did finally try to assert itself it was far less effective than it might have been a few years before. A Europe that longed for British engagement was one that Britain disdained: too needy. A Britain that decided it wanted in after all was one that Europe felt able to rebuff: too haughty. No wonder the relationship has sometimes seemed like a succession of bad dates.

But there were other factors at work alongside this mismarriage of expectations. Something else that recurs time and again in McTague’s tale is the inability of the British political system to deal with the demands that Europe made of it. The irony here is that the superiority of the British political system was an article of faith for many of the people who were most sceptical about being subsumed by European institutions. The UK was governed by a sovereign Parliament, not some mishmash of elected representatives, overmighty bureaucrats and interfering judges. The British electoral system was clean and decisive – the people could dump governments when they had had enough – not some stitch-up of party lists and backroom deals. Above all, Britain had a long and successful history of deciding for itself how to handle the challenges it faced. Except when it came to this matter. The British political system too often simply froze in the face of the European question. The champions of national sovereignty found they were defending a way of doing politics that couldn’t cope with the very thing they were trying to defend it from.

This failure wasn’t for want of trying. Plenty of political leaders went into general elections determined to make Europe the issue at hand and get a mandate for decisive action. It almost never worked because general elections are rarely about a single issue – and when they are, the issue is the politicians themselves, not the thing they want the public to care about. The general elections of 1974 were not about Europe, even though Europe was front and centre for politicians across the political spectrum, from Powell to Heath to Tony Benn. Two elections in one year didn’t settle anything, which is why Wilson felt obliged to go outside the system and call a referendum a year later. When James Goldsmith’s Referendum Party contested the 1997 general election on a pledge to put any further expansion of Brussels’s powers directly to the British people, opinion surveys indicated that more than half of voters agreed with this policy. But less than 3 per cent actually cast their ballot for Goldsmith’s motley array of candidates on polling day. William Hague tried to make the general election of 2001 a referendum on whether Britain should join the euro (‘24 Hours to Save the Pound’) but no one cared. In 2015 Cameron, hoping to spike Ukip’s guns, included a pledge in the Tory Party manifesto to hold an in-out referendum on membership of the EU. But he may have done so in the belief that it wouldn’t be needed because he was unlikely to win an overall majority and the commitment could be bargained away in another coalition deal with the Lib Dems. When he did win a majority he was caught. General elections are not referendums. They aren’t even referendums on whether to have a referendum. The referendums we get are the ones the system has been reduced to by its failure to handle the matter on its own.

Just as Europe inverted partisan loyalties so it also upended views about plebiscitary politics. In March 1975, just after she became Conservative Party leader, Thatcher notoriously described referendums as ‘a device of dictators and demagogues’. In this she was concurring with the views of Roy Jenkins, who had himself been channelling Clement Attlee’s wartime description of referendums as not only ‘unsuitable for the British system, but indeed dangerous’. Just a few months later Thatcher reluctantly had to fight a referendum campaign to confirm Britain’s membership of the EEC, as did Jenkins (who went at it with more enthusiasm). The hope was that one referendum would be enough and the matter would be settled once and for all. It didn’t happen because the decision to stay in had nothing to say about the changing character of the European project after 1975, as it moved from an economic community to a union, expanded to the east, embarked on new treaties and embraced new schemes including a single currency. A common complaint about the 2016 referendum was that it didn’t ask the public what kind of Brexit they might prefer. But likewise the 1975 referendum hadn’t asked the people what kind of Europe they might prefer. That question was thrown back to Parliament. Only now it was a Parliament that had shown itself willing to deploy the referendum device when it couldn’t make up its own mind.

By the time Thatcher was driven from office in 1990, her views about referendums had shifted. She joined the growing chorus of those demanding that any future extension of European powers be put directly to the people. In a debate in the House of Commons in 1991, her successor John Major had stated that Britain would not be prepared to accept ‘wholesale changes in the nature of the [European] Community which would lead it towards an unacceptable dominance over our national life’. He did not explain how these changes would be resisted, beyond the usual prime ministerial promise of getting tough in negotiations. In the same debate, Thatcher had her answer. She demanded a future referendum on the single currency. From that point on, the question of another referendum on Europe became the running sore in British politics. The device that was meant to fix the failures of the parliamentary system ended up destabilising it.

This pattern has repeated itself since 2016, which is where McTague’s book ends. With Parliament seemingly stuck trying to work out how to act on the result of the Brexit referendum, Theresa May called a general election in 2017 to get a mandate for decisive action. It didn’t work, of course, because the public wanted to express its views about other things, including her plans for social care reform. The result was a Parliament even more paralysed than before, and now including a significant faction – among them Labour’s shadow secretary of state for exiting the European Union, Keir Starmer – who were pressing for a second referendum to resolve the issue. May was removed and replaced by Boris Johnson, who had no interest in another referendum but no means either of securing a parliamentary majority for his proposed Brexit deal. He prorogued Parliament to signal his displeasure and was met with howls of outrage from all the people he was trying to provoke.

Only now something happened that had not occurred before: Johnson – expertly guided by Dominic Cummings, the architect of Vote Leave’s victory in 2016 – called, fought and won a general election on the single issue of ‘getting Brexit done’. It was a unique instance of the British electoral system being used to settle the European question. Yet it happened only because that question had effectively brought the political system to a grinding halt. Voters were expressing their understandable impatience with the whole charade rather than a clear view of what they wanted to happen next. Neither did the 2019 general election resolve who had actually won the argument. Its two principal victors had entirely different views of what had been vindicated. For Cummings, it was an endorsement of his scorched earth strategy and a mandate for radical reform of the British state. For Johnson, it was a personal triumph and an invitation to retreat to his comfort zone of muddling through. Cummings was plotting a coup against his boss just days after the election results were announced. Within a year, Johnson had returned the favour and fired him. And less than two years after that, Johnson too was gone, brought down by a scandal over Covid-era parties that Cummings had been instrumental in engineering.

Even if the two men had somehow managed to find a way to work together in office, they would have ended up parting ways in February 2022, when Russia invaded Ukraine. On that there was no bridging the gap between them. Johnson saw it as his Churchill moment and a chance for Britain to resume its historical role of chivvying the rest of Europe into mounting a concerted defence of freedom. Cummings thought the West had brought the disaster on itself and was risking nuclear catastrophe for the sake of an idiotic moral crusade. He cleaved to the views of those in the US – such as Elon Musk and J.D. Vance – who had decided that Zelensky and his European dupes were the real menace. War has a nasty habit of revealing where British political figures really stand on the question of the country’s relationship with Europe because it also means confronting Britain’s dependency on the US. That is the other theme that runs through McTague’s account: European integration might have been conceived as a peace project but its evolution can only be understood through the prism of war. And here, too, Britain found itself unable to square the circle of its conflicting desires.

McTague begins​ his story in wartime Algiers, where three men who would spend their political careers battling over Europe all happened to be in early 1943: Monnet, Macmillan and Powell, one bureaucrat, one politician and one soldier. The fate of Algeria raised the question of the postwar character of France, which in turn raised the question of the future of Europe. Monnet envisaged an answer that bound European nations together. Macmillan believed in a Europe that Britain could support in a superior way from the sidelines. Powell, then as always, wanted his country to follow its own path. During the war these differences could be elided in the common endeavour of defeating fascism. Victory was the great divider. France had to be rebuilt, along with Germany and the rest of continental Europe. That meant American money, which in turn produced a fierce desire on the part of European leaders not to become an outpost of a new transatlantic empire. Britain needed American money, but it wasn’t so ready to start again at the business of institution building. As well as still having its own empire, it also had an intact democracy and in the summer of 1945 its war-weary voters elected a Labour government in a landslide. Attlee’s administration was determined to defend national sovereignty, which was seen as the essential precondition of any socialist reconstruction of the economy. While Europe was committing to its new path, Britain went its own way. Powell got what he wanted, thanks to politicians with whom he agreed about almost nothing else.

A decade later, an aborted war changed the dynamic. Suez was a disaster for both Britain and France but the two nations drew different lessons from the experience. For Britain, it revealed the extent to which its ability to shape its own future was an illusion – it was dependent on the sufferance of others, above all the US. It must never again go against American interests but it also needed friends nearer to home. From that point on, joining the European project became a question of when, not if. In France, Suez precipitated the collapse of the Fourth Republic and the return of de Gaulle. Though the immediate impetus for his second coming was the crisis in Algeria, de Gaulle also brought with him a revivified idea of the role France could and should play in Europe. He saw the institutions that Monnet had built as offering a site of resistance to American influence so long as France was in the lead. They must not be diluted by a British presence, which would only bring in the Americans by the back door. So de Gaulle’s response to Macmillan’s request for entry was a firm non. The Algiers generation would have to depart the stage – to be replaced by men like Heath and Wilson, Georges Pompidou and Willy Brandt – before Britain could meet its European destiny.

Yet it was in the end a far longer and more dangerous conflict – the Cold War – that determined Britain’s European fate. For many politicians who might otherwise have had their doubts about the European project, including Thatcher, the ongoing struggle against the Soviet Union was the primary reason to put those misgivings aside. Nothing was more important than binding the free states of Europe together against the threat of communism. Nothing was settled, though, about what might happen if the fight for freedom was actually won. Thatcher’s Bruges speech in 1988, where she voiced her profound misgivings about the federal direction of travel that the European Community was taking under Jacques Delors, also articulated her own idea of the Europe to which Britain was proud to belong. It included the states currently under the Soviet yoke. ‘We must never forget that east of the Iron Curtain, people who once enjoyed a full share of European culture, freedom and identity have been cut off from their roots. We shall always look on Warsaw, Prague and Budapest as great European cities.’ That raised the question of what might follow if those people were allowed to participate in Delors’s European project. Would they displace its Franco-German centre of gravity or would they further secure it?

Coming up with an answer exposed the incoherence of British resistance to European integration. Thatcher, like many other Cold Warriors, wanted a Europe that was broader but shallower: more member states, fewer obligations, a community based on free trade and a shared willingness to defend its common liberties against enemies further to the east. In other words, it would be an extension of the anti-Soviet alliance. Yet this view was not shared by the man who had become the lodestar of principled opposition to any dilution of national sovereignty. Powell did not believe in a Europe of shared values, even if he happened to share those values himself. Thatcher had got wind of their differences earlier in the decade, when in February 1981 Powell attended a meeting of the Conservative Philosophy Group, whose members included Roger Scruton and Michael Oakeshott. There they clashed over the principles of foreign policy. Thatcher had confidently declared that nuclear weapons were needed to defend ‘Western values’. Powell responded: ‘No, we do not fight for values. I would fight for this country even if it had a communist government.’ After this startling riposte the two went at it. ‘Nonsense, Enoch. If I send British troops abroad, it will be to defend our values.’ ‘No, prime minister, values exist in a transcendental realm, beyond space and time. They can neither be fought for nor destroyed.’ Thatcher was reported to be ‘utterly baffled’ by this response. But it indicated that very different visions of the future were likely to be lurking behind the banner of Euroscepticism. Powell was already articulating the need to defend British sovereignty let the heavens fall, which implied that the entire European project could be dispensed with. Nothing in Thatcher’s later Bruges speech suggested she was anywhere close to this. ‘Britain does not dream of some cosy, isolated existence on the fringes of the European Community,’ she said. ‘Our destiny is in Europe, as part of the community.’ But if that was true, it did not explain what she would do if the community’s values were no longer her own.

Meanwhile, the man who had been Powell’s nemesis and then became Thatcher’s scold was warning of a different problem. In a Commons debate about the ratification of the Maastricht Treaty, Heath mocked Tory discomfort over its terms. He made it clear that he did not approve of opt-outs for Britain. He was in favour of the Social Chapter (covering working conditions and labour rights) that the Major government had rejected: ‘I do not want this country to become the sweatshop of Europe.’ He did not like the government’s opposition to free movement across national frontiers: ‘We agreed on boundaries when we signed the Treaty of Rome in 1972.’ But he also counselled against expansion to the east. ‘The standard of living of the former Soviet-controlled territories is 32.1 per cent of the community average,’ he said. ‘How can these countries be welcomed in, and how can they live on equal terms with the rest of the community? It is just not possible.’ Heath believed in a Europe that was self-contained, tightly integrated and able to assert itself against American triumphalism in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union. In that sense, he remained Britain’s one true Gaullist and his case against expansion echoed the one that de Gaulle had made against British entry in the early 1960s – it would distort the project and make it easier for the Americans to set terms. By contrast, Thatcher had a broad Atlanticist vision that stretched from Washington to Kyiv. But she could not answer Heath’s challenge: how would people from the East be prevented from moving west under the terms of the treaties to which Britain was committed? And if they couldn’t, how would British politics cope with the populist backlash?

Thatcher’s successors tried various things in response to this challenge but they were all variations on the cherry-picking theme. For a long time the question of free movement was subsumed by anxieties about monetary union. Britain’s humiliating exit from the ERM in 1992 scuppered the Conservatives’ reputation for economic competence and did for Major’s hold over his government as effectively as forced entry into the ERM had done for Thatcher’s hold over hers just two years earlier. For New Labour, the choice to be made then became whether or not Britain would join the euro. Gordon Brown was initially keen, Blair more wary, but when Blair became keen, Brown threw a spanner in the works and his toys out of the pram in the form of ‘five economic tests’ – at least three more than were necessary – and it never happened. Faced with his implacable chancellor, Blair turned his attention to higher things; the invasion of Iraq followed. When in late 2003 Britain had to decide whether to impose transitional controls on the movement of people from ten new member states of the former Eastern Bloc – including Poland – due to join the EU in May 2004, the Blair government was surprisingly relaxed. It had commissioned a Home Office study that forecast a net increase in arrivals of between five thousand and thirteen thousand a year, which sounded manageable. At the same time, Blair was conscious that some of these new states – including Poland – had been supportive of his Iraq endeavours when Germany and France were doing their best to block him. Thatcher’s hopes and Heath’s fears appeared to have come to pass: the Eastern European states were showing themselves to be more Atlanticist than their Western European counterparts. Blair, a Thatcherite in these respects as in others, wanted to encourage these new alliances. In a final irony, the decision to keep Britain out of the euro had helped sustain a liberalised, flexible labour market in the UK that proved to be a magnet for foreign workers. The result was that in the absence of controls 1.2 million people (an average of 170,000 per year) moved to Britain from the EU over the next seven years, a large number of them from Eastern Europe.

The decision, or non-decision, that allowed this to happen was, as McTague calls it, ‘one of the most consequential ever taken by a postwar British government’. It meant that Powell’s two preoccupations – immigration and Europe – would finally start to converge. When it fell to David Cameron to try to get a grip on the slippery European question, he resorted to the time-honoured tactic of promising to get tough at the negotiating table. In 2011, he announced in Brussels that he would veto any new treaty for the Eurozone – at that point in the middle of its own existential crisis over Greek debt – unless it included further guarantees protecting British financial interests. Europe’s leaders responded by ignoring him and doing what they wanted outside the EU’s formal infrastructure. In March 2014, Cameron set out a new list of measures he would require from any renegotiation of European treaties, including fresh controls to stop ‘vast migrations’ of people. There was a lot of angry talk but very little changed. Criticism of Cameron’s strategy started to mount. Dominic Cummings called his approach ‘whining, rude, dishonest, unpleasant, childishly belligerent in public while pathetically craven in private’. In an interview with the Times, Cummings said that Cameron’s admiration for Harold Macmillan told you everything you needed to know. Quoting Eliot’s poem of the same name, he dismissed him as just another one of Westminster’s ‘hollow men’. In that year’s European Parliament elections, Ukip topped the poll for the first time, with 26.6 per cent of the vote.

When his final opportunity arrived to get concessions, Cameron realised he had to raise the stakes. Threatening a veto was no longer enough. Now he had to dangle the prospect of Britain’s leaving altogether. I remember the first time I heard the word Brexit, at a lecture given by the former Italian prime minister Enrico Letta in Cambridge in June 2014. I had to ask someone afterwards what it meant. Letta argued that the risk of Britain leaving the EU was real precisely because no one was treating it as such. It could happen by accident. Cameron seemed determined to make his point for him. The sequencing of his brinksmanship was all wrong. For his threat to work, Europe’s leaders would have to take it seriously, but they would only take it seriously if the negotiations had already failed. Instead the outcome was the usual fudge in which all sides claimed to have got what they wanted but no one was really satisfied. From the perspective of Europe’s federalists, they had given away plenty, including an agreement that ‘references to ever closer union do not apply to the United Kingdom.’ But it wasn’t enough to make a difference to the referendum campaign, which turned on the things that people actually cared about: immigration, healthcare and having a say. Cummings had long since concluded that a Brexit referendum could only be won if the argument for leaving could be couched in positive terms: not simply less interference and less annoyance but more money, better public services, greater control. He was right. But he was wrong if he thought it would settle anything. Brexit is currently as unpopular as it has ever been: barely a third of the public still believes it was a good idea. Meanwhile the man who has been most closely associated with the cause of getting Britain out of Europe looks like he could be our next prime minister.

In​ McTague’s telling that grim dénouement has a feeling of ironic inevitability about it. Farage ending up in Downing Street would be of a piece with the confusion, complacency and contradictory political behaviour that led Britain first to stumble into Europe and then to stumble out again. Yet there are so many tantalising contingencies. Just as we might be living in a different country had Powell not deserted the Conservatives, so would we be had John Smith lived. As Labour leader Smith established himself as a committed Europhile, set on British membership of the single currency. Following Black Wednesday, he was on course to win the general election that eventually delivered Blair his landslide. What might have happened if Smith had taken Britain into the euro? Ed Balls, who as chief economic adviser to the Treasury had helped design Brown’s five economic tests, believes we might have ended up leaving the EU even sooner than we did. But the alternative possibility is that we might never have left at all. Other nations have found the euro to be a political straitjacket because the pain and uncertainty of exit far outweigh the attractions of independence, even for politicians and electorates sick of the EU and all its works. Greece stuck it out. Italy has stuck it out. France gives every sign of sticking it out. We might have stuck it out too.

Farage believes that his own lucky escape also came courtesy of Blair. After his victory in 1997, Blair was keen to prove his credentials as a moderniser and that included introducing electoral reform. Until this point Farage had been butting his head against the constraints of the first-past-the-post system, which made it almost impossible for outsiders like him to get elected anywhere. His best result had been a poor fourth when standing in the 1997 general election in Salisbury, where he only just scraped together three thousand votes (the Conservative winner secured more than 25,000). But in 1999, proportional representation was introduced just in time for that year’s European elections. Ukip, under the leadership of Michael Holmes, won a barely respectable 6.5 per cent of the vote. But it was enough to gain the party three seats in the European Parliament. One went to Holmes. Another went to Farage. It transformed his profile and finally gave him the opportunity to make a noise where some people at least would be forced to listen. ‘If you asked me what was the most significant moment in my career,’ Farage said later, ‘there’s absolutely no question about it – getting elected to the European Parliament.’ Blair had given him his platform.

Then there is the question of Michael Gove. McTague notes that Gove’s presence was perhaps the key to the Leave campaign in 2016, because without Gove there would almost certainly have been no commitment from Boris Johnson, who had been looking to see which way his colleague would jump. I was told some time after the referendum by a reliable source that Gove had expected Cameron to make life much more difficult for him. When he went to inform the prime minister and his chancellor, George Osborne, of his decision to back Brexit, Gove assumed they would tell him he could only remain in the cabinet if he agreed not to campaign. If he wanted to campaign, he would have to resign from the government. Faced with this choice, Gove had decided, he would keep his job and keep his mouth shut. But the choice was never put to him. Instead Cameron and Osborne merely expressed their patrician displeasure at his disloyalty and sent him on his way with scowls of disapproval, like schoolteachers disappointed in the antics of a once favoured pupil. As Cummings put it: whining, rude, but craven. No Gove, no Johnson. No Johnson, no Brexit. For want of a bit of tough-minded negotiating when it might actually have made a difference, the kingdom was lost.

McTague brilliantly pieces together the twists and turns in this tragicomedy of mad passions and misplaced expectations. It is not an original account in that it relies heavily on published sources (his chapter about the 1975 referendum, for instance, is based almost entirely on Robert Saunders’s Yes to Europe!, published in 2018). But it frequently feels revelatory when laid out in sequence. He also captures the peculiar atmosphere that permeates the never-ending political intrigue of the fight over Europe. For so many of those involved it was a great adventure, though the stakes were often absurdly high. Powell, having been an actual soldier in the Second World War, later voiced his deep regret that he hadn’t succeeded in dying for his country. Those who came after him were often make-believe soldiers, who found in the Eurosceptic cause something for which they were willing to pretend to risk everything. Between the Waves also makes clear just what a male story this is: there are almost no women in it anywhere, except Thatcher, and towards the end Gisela Stuart (who is highly unusual in having arrived at her Euroscepticism from an open-minded position, after discovering first-hand how poorly the European Union’s institutions performed in practice). It reeks of testosterone. Boys will be boys, but it’s a shame they didn’t find something more constructive to do with all that pent-up energy.