History of England 1-6

But two more victories awaited him. Both were in his dealings with the United States, in the contested field of nuclear defence. Macmillan had long urged the need for Britain to possess an independent nuclear capacity. The Americans were sympathetic, but there was one difficulty: why should Britain feel the need for a deterrent of its own, the ‘Europeanists’ at the White House enquired, just when it was seeking admission to the protective pale of Europe? And what would the Europeans themselves feel about this? Macmillan believed that without a deterrent of its own, Britain would lose stature. Moreover, surely the strength of Britain’s proposed marriage to the Community lay in its substantial military dowry? First, the Skybolt missile was proposed, but, after endless wranglings and misunderstandings, the scheme was dropped. With weeks to go before negotiations with the EEC were to begin, Polaris was substituted. Britain was now a true nuclear power. The arrangement had been smoothed by the warm personal relations between Macmillan and President Kennedy. While their subordinates bickered, the two war veterans quietly took matters in hand at Nassau. It seemed that the ‘special relationship’ had been triumphantly reaffirmed. One cloud crossed the bright, hopeful sun. When, in a telephone conversation, Macmillan recalled the glory days of Nassau, the president was oddly distracted and unresponsive. ‘When was that?’ asked a puzzled Kennedy. ‘The Nassau meeting,’ answered Macmillan. ‘Oh yes – very good.’

But if relations with the United States had now warmed, those with the European nations were floundering. Among the six original nations of the Community, France, led by de Gaulle, was the paramount power. His hostility to his former benefactors had always rather slumbered than slept; the knowledge that Britain possessed an independent nuclear capability yet seemed unwilling to share it with its continental neighbours pricked it awake. But now, it seemed, mighty Albion wished to join the European Economic Community. Neither de Gaulle nor Adenauer, his German counterpart, was minded to make the process easy.

‘I don’t believe in abroad,’ Quentin Crisp once wrote. ‘I think that all foreigners speak English behind our backs.’ Crisp’s words would have had resonance for many in England. Now many felt that the United Kingdom was about to wander into the same crevasse as its predecessors, at unfathomable cost. Thus the Labour politician George Brown remarked on Britain entering the Common Market: ‘It is not the price of butter which in the end really matters. It is the size, stability, strength and political attitude of Europe that matters. We have got to have a new kind of organisation in Europe…if we don’t succeed, I doubt whether there will be much of a Britain for our children’s children.’

Yet even so ardent a Europhile as Brown believed that Britain could, and should, enter the fold as its shepherd. The new chancellor, Reginald Maudling, was forthright on the question when he confessed that ‘the French do not want us in Europe at all. The Community of the Six has become a Paris/Bonn axis’. This complaint would echo down the decades, though with Berlin in place of Bonn. In opposition, Harold Wilson invoked a fear that entry into the Common Market would be a betrayal of the Commonwealth: ‘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 Düsseldorf.’ Gaitskell, though in many ways sympathetic, was also realistic. Many Labour members saw Britain being ‘sucked up in a kind of giant capitalist Catholic conspiracy … unable to conduct any independent foreign policy at all’.

It is salutary to remember that at its inception, the European project was what we might call ‘faith-based’. Purely practical considerations came later, when the aftermath of the Second World War made trade cooperation a matter of overwhelming urgency. But now negotiations for Britain’s entry had begun, led by the chief whip, one Edward Heath. He spoke for many of his generation when he recalled what he had seen at the Nuremberg trials: ‘We were surrounded by destruction, homelessness, hunger and despair. Only by working together had we any hope of creating a society which would uphold the true values of European civilisation. Reconciliation and reconstruction must be our task.’