Tales from a ring-side seat

Date: 16/05/1996

THESE are tense times for the UK's relations with the continent.

While most of the Union honoured Schuman Day last week, the UK's notorious tabloid newspaper The Sun struck a typically different tone with a front page headline of “We 'ate EU”.

To contemporary commentators, such cross-Channel friction is a relatively recent phenomenon. But those with longer memories and a better grasp of history see it as a recurring theme throughout the whole of this century.

Few have been better placed to witness this prickly relationship than Sir Roy Denman. He has had a ring-side seat for almost half of this troubled period from which to witness the non-meeting of British and continental minds.

During his distinguished career of public service, Denman twice worked directly for the former UK Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson. For him, the premier's attitude to the Union was symptomatic of the wider relationship between the UK's ruling class and its EU partners.

“He was the most intelligent man I have ever met. But he was terribly insular. The foreigners he preferred were from the Commonwealth or English-speaking Scandinavian Socialists,” recalls Denman.

The former Commission official describes the problem in even more graphic style in his recent book Missed Chances, which charts the UK's failure to understand and deal with continental Europe throughout the last 100 years and will see it end this century “little more important than Switzerland”.

He describes Wilson's approach to the Union as “that of principal boy in a pantomime, wrapped in the Union Jack, crowned by the helmet of Saint George and standing up to foreign dragons”.

He adds, somewhat wearily: “The pantomime has continued for more than 20 years; periodically the cast has changed, but not the script.”

The UK's partners have reacted first with disillusion, then irritation and now indifference.

Denman is clear that a large part of the responsibility for the current atmosphere lies with the British media - much of which is foreign-owned and xenophobic - and politicians.

Warming to his theme, he says: “No one has the vision or the guts to say 'I don't care whether you like it or not, it is not in the national interest to leave (the Union)'. What the government has never done is explain to the people what it is all about.”

He argues that a pure trade relationship would have two consequences. “One is we would count for nothing in the affairs of the world. Can you imagine an American president coming to London to see a British prime minister outside the Union? He would be better employed going to see Disneyworld in Florida.

“If we had a European Economic Area trading arrangement, we would have to accept, without any consultation whatsoever, every regulation coming out of Brussels. The Austrians, Swedes and Finns found this unsatisfactory, so they joined instead,” he argues.

Denman's love of things European was originally sparked by a gifted school teacher who inspired in him a deep interest in the German language and literature. But he soon found he was on a different wavelength to many of his civil service colleagues.

“I was sent to Bonn in the late 1950s and found the other diplomats of my age were usually crass bores. But there was this interesting American club where journalists and others would gather for lunch. One day I was summoned by my head of chancery, who said: 'Look here, Denman, you are seeing too much of the Krauts and journalists.' I told him I thought that was why I was there and was given a real bollicking,” he says, laughing as he recalls the incident.

Denman laments the UK's inability to repeat its diplomatic success in dismantling an empire relatively peacefully by establishing a new constructive role in the Union.

He attributes this partly to the absence of a revolution to breathe new life into the old order - as occurred elsewhere on the continent - and to the country's cosy 'old boy' network, where advancement depends on the school one went to, with the result that the boards of the country's major industries are filled with former diplomats.

“A German friend once said to me: 'It will be alright, Roy, industry leaders will tell the government.' I told him that industry leaders wouldn't tell them a damn thing as the boards were full of old boys and that is all they are, old boys. I worry for the shareholders,” he says, not entirely in jest.

Denman's distinguished British career in public service took him to the heart of the country's relations and entry negotiations with the Union. He detects a fear of the continent in Whitehall and Westminster.

“They are afraid of Europe taking control and this is absurd. Maybe a sensible administration would say that there is this thing called the European Commission. Whether we like it or not is irrelevant. It is a power base and we should send our best people to it. I would be quite brutal and when top Commission jobs became available, would send a permanent secretary from London to fill it,” he volunteers.

He contrasts unfavourably the UK administration's approach to EU institutions with the care it took to send its brightest and best around the empire and the Commonwealth.

“The French are logical and send first-rate people to the Commission. It would be unfair to say the French run the Commission, but they have a far greater say than their share of Community GDP,” he says.

Denman himself had no hesitation when he was offered the post of director-general in the Commission's external relations department in 1977.

He adapted quickly to the new realities of Union membership, where responsibility for trade negotiations lay with the Commission and not with national capitals, but his former colleagues did not.

“When I joined the European Commission, we were trying to wrap up the Tokyo Round. I went to see the Americans with a couple of colleagues from the Commission and the British were in the outer room. They were furious,” he recalls with a hearty chuckle.

A larger-than-life figure and not afraid to say the unpalatable, Denman was no shy retiring bureaucrat either in Brussels or Washington, where he was EU ambassador for seven years and is still remembered for his trenchant memos.

In one, penned when trade friction between the Union and Japan was at its height, he described the Japanese workforce as living in rabbit hutches and the country's propensity for imports as somewhat akin to the chances in the late 1970s of enjoying oneself on a rainy Sunday morning in Glasgow's Sauchiehall Street.

Reminded of his colourful prose, he admits he had never visited Sauchiehall Street and, with a chuckle, adds a postscript: “I went out to Japan after the infamous memo was published and was confronted by a delegation of Japanese trade unionists all wearing large rabbit ears. The management said to me: 'You must go on saying this, Denman-San. Our living standards are lower.' “

As he looks ahead, Denman predicts and positively relishes a change of government in the UK. But he cautions against high hopes of major sea changes in the country's relationship with the Union.

“Tony Blair will have his work cut out and yet he has the chance to be the most successful British prime minister this century. It would be folly for our continental friends to expect too much too soon. I would say that the crucial decision a Labour government would have to take would not be about majority voting, but about joining economic and monetary union. That is such a surrender of sovereignty that once you do that, you are well on the way to becoming a formal federal union. I would guess it will take a second administration to do that.”