7 minute read
The View from Europe
‘I had no memory of my dad doing anything but politics. I felt it was something important and it made me feel proud. The more I engaged him over the dinner table, the more those precocious interrogations gave me a taste for political journalism. After a brief conviction, around 10 years old, that I would one day be Prime Minister, I came to an early realisation that I relished being a tomato thrower and not a tomato target. It was far more fun, and far less hard.’ Political journalist Tom Newton Dunn (C2 1989-91) on his father, Bill Newton Dunn (C2 1955-59).
Every political argument has opposing poles. The furthest left, the hardest right. The libertarian absolute, the totalitarian extreme. In Britain’s eternal debate about its role in Europe, my father, Bill Newton Dunn, occupied the pro-European pole. He was the arch-federalist, the ultimate anti-nationalist, and the devout believer in the United States of Europe. The Eurosceptics, who eventually morphed into hard Brexiteers, were his mortal enemy. They eventually won (though only for now, he insists), but the war that Bill and his tribe waged against them has lasted half a century to date and defined his entire political career. Thirty-one of those years for my father were spent in the European Parliament, making him Europe’s longest serving MEP by the time it all ended. But politics for him began in Stockwell, not Brussels. Conservatism in South London in the mid-1970s was a lonely business, because there weren’t many of them. Bill chaired North Lambeth Conservatives and the chairman of next-door Brixton Conservatives was John Major. Both were looking for seats for the 1979 general election. My father got down to the last two in Putney and was narrowly beaten to it by a silver-tongued young QC, David Mellor. Bill found a berth elsewhere.
In 1979, the first direct elections to the European Parliament were held and Bill was voted in as the Tory MEP for Lincolnshire. Bill soon ‘went native’ in Brussels, as Thatcher’s Number 10 used to enjoy saying. My father and many of his generation born in the 1930s and 40s felt a deep philosophical commitment to building a Europe that would never go to war with itself again. That only deepened once he was surrounded
by an explosion of bonhomie of so many different cultures and languages crowding the parliament’s corridors and bars. That, plus working alongside an array of fascinating people (many of whom had held very high office in their home nations already) led him to believe that Westminster, with its quaint traditions and unelected upper house, should remain as a regional parliament but Brussels and Strasbourg were the shiny future. An early win for Bill was to help persuade the European Parliament to use majority voting in the Council of Ministers. In turn, the Council enforced it on a livid Margaret Thatcher. The Prime Minister hauled my father and other Tory MEPs into Number 10 for a horrendous telling off, which then turned into a two-way shouting match with Bill and several others. She never forgave them.
Thatcher and her friends were reported to have celebrated when my father and a few other Europhile Tory MEPs lost their seats in 1994. It was the tail end of the Major government, and true-blue Lincolnshire went Labour red – the same way as hundreds of Tory constituencies up and down the land did too in the 1997 Blair landslide.
With his battle intensifying with the Eurosceptics, Major offered my father a peerage in the hope of bolstering his pro-European ranks in Westminster. My father turned it down, feeling it wasn’t for him without a ministerial job to go with it, and preferring to bide his time for a return to Brussels. He was re-elected as an MEP in 1999, on the same Tory ticket as arch-sceptic Roger Helmer. A decade later, neither man represented the Tories anymore. My father defected to the Lib Dems just 18 months later in 2000, citing the Conservatives’ growing Euroscepticism and insisting – as many defectors have done before and since – that he ‘hadn’t left his party, but his party had left him’.
It was the pre-email age. I only learned of his personal bombshell when descending the steps of a Boeing 747 on my return to Heathrow from a romantic holiday in Cuba when I was finally able to check my phone messages. The voicemail from my father was a vintage of his characteristic sense of underplay: ‘Your father here. Hope you had a nice time in Cuba. I’ve defected to the Liberal Democrats. Your mother’s well, toodle-pip for now.’ To tackle that evermore vicious schism, David Cameron promised the Brexit referendum, and it became a reality when his government was re-elected in 2015. Actually, leaving the EU was only ever a fringe argument that was not believed even by many Tory MPs who went on to become prominent Brexiteers. Many of them told me so. But as soon as Cameron made it a 50/50 realistic option, it began to develop as a popular bandwagon. While never a strong Europhile or Europhobe myself (I was one of those middle-of-theroaders that once made up so much of the
Our family in 1983
country), it was around then that I began to clash with my father over the onward march of ever-closer European integration. Whether it was the right or wrong thing was not my beef with him. It was that I could quite painfully see its proponents were leaving the people behind. As it turned out, quite a significant few of those alienated voters lived in his patch of Lincolnshire. Bill’s second European Parliament innings again came to an end, again involuntarily, in May 2014 with an almost entire clear-out of Lib Dems – who went from 12 MEPs down to one. As the junior coalition partner, Nick Clegg’s party was deeply unpopular, and its Westminster base was also destroyed a year later at the general election. Aged 73, my father had had a good innings by then and had come to terms with hanging up his parliamentary pass – having promised my long-suffering mother (plus me and his two new grandsons) he wouldn’t stand again. What is it with politicians and promises, eh? There was one more swansong to come. The much-depleted Lib Dems asked Bill to stand as a candidate in the Euro elections in May 2019. In doing so, he became the only person across all 28 states to contest all nine European elections between 1979 and 2019. To his immense surprise, and at the grand age of 78, Bill was re-elected as a Lib Dem MEP for the East Midlands region, along with a Labour candidate and three from the Brexit Party. Not a single Tory MEP was returned in the once Tory bastion region, in what became the party’s worst national election for 100 years, as well as the death knell for Theresa May’s premiership. It made my father the only surviving MEP elected to the first European Parliament in 1979 who was there 40 years later. With the British people’s decision to leave the EU long in place by then, the swansong would never last long. My father made one of the last speeches ever by a British MEP in the European Parliament on 29th January 2020. It was the parliament’s final plenary session before the United Kingdom formally left the European Union at 11pm Greenwich Mean Time two days later. Tieless by then, as was the way of many in the Liberal group, he rose from his seat to tell the Brussels hemicycle of his ‘immense pride in helping to contribute to the uniting of Europe’. He added, ‘We are all small nations in Europe now. We have to work with other Europeans to resist the superpowers – Russia, China, America and India. We’re going to suffer a very bad time as we discover reality, and then I think we’ll be back.’
Will we? I can’t see it – or not at least in the political short and middle term. But if we are, it wouldn’t be the first time my father had caught a political tomato and returned it with vigour.
Top left to right: Tom and Bill. The European Parliament Assembly Room. Below: The European Parliament in Brussels
