It was not just the persistently overcast skies – a weather pattern once dubbed the “Brabant gloom” by Roy Jenkins, a former European commission president – that made working in Brussels for the Daily Telegraph in the early 1990s a joyless experience. It was my role as deputy to Boris Johnson, then “bureau chief” in name but solo performer in practice, that ensured my first job as a foreign correspondent was a trial of endurance.
There were just the two of us in the Telegraph office, and we were working long hard hours reporting on the political and economic convulsions of the Maastricht treaty negotiations. The story itself, of negotiations that played out in meeting rooms of Brussels, was full of political intrigue and drama. And whatever happened was likely to shape Europe for years to come.
How Johnson wrote about it, though, not only alarmed me at the time but helped set in stone a pervasive anti-European narrative that never really encountered serious challenge in the UK. For shamelessly painting the European commission as an insanely grandiose and imperialist body, he was rewarded by flurries of “herograms” from our editor, Max Hastings, including one that read “we all think you’re doing a wonderful job if only you’d learn to be a little more pompous”. Johnson’s trajectory to the gates of Downing Street had begun.
Over the months and years, those inventive stories, of fishermen forced to wear hairnets or snails reclassified as fish, created a deeply rooted belief that anything out of Brussels must be either loony or the result of a sinister continental plot. His most explosive story of all, published in May 1992, claimed that Jacques Delors, then commission president, was conspiring to centralise huge powers in Brussels, in effect creating a European superstate.
Even Johnson’s supporters admitted that the story was distorted. He blamed his editors for the wording and never even tried to defend it when challenged. But it was repeated as fact and won him the adulation of the far right across Europe. In Britain it fanned Little Englander flames and many draw direct lines from this casting of Brussels as an invading force to the current perilous moment in British history in which “freedom” from Europe at any price is apparently desired by millions, even at the expense of the economy and the constitutional unravelling of the United Kingdom.
It is a circular irony – and perhaps even an inevitability – that Johnson, now 55, looks set to be the prime minister entrusted with resolving the national crisis he spawned with his writing two decades ago.
