Europe’s dining-table diplomacy will leave Britain with indigestion

Seduced by EU hospitality, we have ignored our friends in the Commonwealth

All euro notes depict a bridge, but really they should show a dining table. Most EU crisis stories – and what other EU stories are there these days? – climax with a dinner. These are not, for the most part, ceremonial occasions. They are how the European Union is run. Commissioners, foreign ministers, finance ministers, or heads of government, eat and drink and argue. Late at night, something, sometimes, is agreed. In the small hours, spin doctors interpret it to the world. Over the ensuing weeks, months, years, bureaucrats try to implement it.

This was the method of business in Brussels on Thursday night. The eurozone group discussed – as always – Greece. Then the EU heads of government insulted one another at dinner for a couple of hours about migration. Then they let David Cameron say a few words over the cheese about his referendum.

When she was Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher hated these Euro-scoffs. Last week, her private account of the Fontainebleau summit of 1984 was released. That meeting was, for her, the successful end of five years of struggle for a big rebate of Britain’s excessive contribution to what was then called the European Economic Community (EEC). But even on this triumphant occasion, she endured the dinner with her fellow heads of government with distaste. She could not bear all those men sitting round swapping “weak, rather futile anecdotes”. The way to a man’s heart is said to be through his stomach: that method did not work on the only woman present.

Her hostility, I think, was not mere puritanical dislike of seeing people enjoy themselves. It was the result of inwardly asking herself the question, “Who is this for?”, and not liking the answer. Thirty years on, that question still needs asking and the answer is much the same: it is for those sitting round the table rather than those not invited to the feast. The leaders have the party, you might say, and the people have the hangover.

Big meals, to be sure, are an indispensable tool of diplomacy. People who have come a long way need to be welcomed and put at ease by their hosts. They are more relaxed and friendly with good food and drink inside them. They feel under a greater obligation to be polite and cooperative. But the EU is not a club of ambassadors, or even of politicians. It is, whether we like it or not, a form of government, a bloated version of a country. It has a commission, a court of justice, a parliament, a legal personality, a passport and a foreign service. Part of it has a central bank and a currency.

The fact that it moves forward through its dinners shows its fundamental problem, the reason for its lack of legitimacy in the eyes of many. It did not arise from the votes or wishes or common practice of the citizens, but from the minds of a few powerful visionaries. Indeed, its principal architect, Jean Monnet, who was never elected to anything, firmly believed that it could only happen if the people were not consulted until it was too late for them to stop it. It had to come about, Monnet believed, by a “silent revolution”. This was led by roughly the number of people who can be fitted round a grand dinner table.

By the time Britain joined the EEC in January 1973, that silent revolution had been achieved, though not completed. Although our leaders, nervous of sceptical voters, played down the point, Monnet had secured his wish that the Community should not be “merely a mechanism for coordination among nation states”, but a replacement for those states. The diners’ club had made the rules and we could not expect to change them. We should just be grateful that we could sit at the table and start tucking in (though paying a strikingly high proportion of the bill).

When we made this decision, we were turning away from the most distinctive feature of our political culture – our parliamentary idea of ourselves. From Magna Carta onwards, we had built on the belief that the authority of the King – which has nowadays morphed into that of the state – was granted or withheld by us. At first, just by a few of us; then by “freeborn men”; then, in the 20th century, by every sane adult citizen of either sex. We were represented in Parliament. From that Parliament, the government was formed. So electing people mattered, public debate mattered, the passing of laws mattered, decisions openly arrived at mattered. At key moments – the classic example was May 1940 – our representatives could make all the difference. Dinners didn’t have much to do with it. Winston Churchill was exceedingly fond of dinner, but he knew that his political sustenance came from the House of Commons.

By moving away from our own tradition, we also cut ourselves off from the other countries which pursued it. At the time, our break with the Commonwealth, which EEC entry entailed, was seen as a sign of modernisation. Instead of dreary old New Zealand butter, we would have the smart French unsalted stuff. We were getting rid of our old imperial pretensions, it was said, and belatedly recognising the existence of the continent of which we were a part.

But it was a strange decision to weaken our open and friendly relationships with countries such as Canada, Australia and New Zealand who, literally and metaphorically, spoke our own language. We opened our borders to people with whom we had little historic connection and increasingly blocked them to our cousins.

In the 21st century, our mistake has become clearer. When the credit crunch came, it was just those Old Commonwealth countries which our governments had tended to disdain which survived best. George Osborne implicitly recognised this by appointing a Canadian central banker, Mark Carney, to come and run the Bank of England. Although these countries all had smaller populations than our own, they did none of the things recommended to us to prosper in the modern world. They did not “pool” sovereignty or enter protectionist trading blocs. Instead, they tried to make their own deals in the global market, reducing their own subsidies and protections as they did so. They prospered by innovating. Today, for example, New Zealand has half the number of sheep it farmed 30 years ago, but produces the same amount of meat from them, with far greater profit. In a similar period, Britain has been forced to have its trade negotiations conducted by the EU. The EU’s share of world trade has fallen. While the Europeans have been eating their dinners, the world has been eating their lunch.

According to Euro-theory, Australia or New Zealand, alone and a long way from anywhere, ought to be “isolated”. Instead, they thrive, with healthy public finances. Their citizens, and those of Canada, being English-speaking, well educated and brought up in Anglosphere democratic and legal traditions, are employable across the world. In Britain, they barely count as foreigners. We have even trusted our child abuse inquiry to a New Zealand judge, Justice Lowell Goddard. We would never do the same with an Italian or a German. We neglect the fact that the Old Commonwealth now has some of the longest continuous experience of good government in the world. We ignore the way in which the nations we spawned have shown more faith in the British way of doing things than we have shown ourselves, and have succeeded.

Poor Mr Cameron. In the coming months, he must eat for Britain right across the continent of Europe. Unfortunately, the EU system he hopes to reconcile with our own is indigestible.