The final Blair–Brown battle

16 June 2007

Fraser Nelson says that Tony Blair’s swansong summit next week is fraught with danger for Gordon Brown. The last thing the next Prime Minister wants in his in-tray is a new EU constitution that he has to sell to the British public

Mr Blair was saved from holding such a vote by the referendums in France and the Netherlands. But history is not set to repeat itself. President Sarkozy is an enthusiast for the new deal and is unlikely to hold a referendum in France. It is a closer call for the Dutch, but the government will do all it possibly can to avoid consulting the public. Ireland is constitutionally obliged to hold a referendum in such circumstances, but is unlikely to say ‘No’ on this occasion. That leaves Britain, which has not been consulted on the European Question since 1975, when it voted to stay in the EEC.

Mr Blair always believed he could win Britain round. ‘It’s just a case of mobilising support,’ he would say to incredulous aides. His strategy would have been to misrepresent the referendum, saying that the question it really posed was whether Britain wanted to be in or out of the EU as a whole. He hoped that, by the time the issue was put to the British people, every other country would have signed up, enabling him to sell the vote as a choice between isolation or engagement. In the event, the vote was never held, and Mr Blair was denied the great reckoning on Europe that he had always craved.

Two years on, it would be a brave Prime Minister who asked the British people whether they wanted to stay in the EU or leave altogether — given that the European Commission’s own research shows just 34 per cent of the British public consider EU membership ‘a good thing’. This is the lowest figure in the entire 27-member union.

Mr Barroso’s latest advice for Mr Blair is to ignore public opinion, or ‘some of the populisms we have in our member states’, as he put it on Tuesday. The Prime Minister is uniquely placed to do just that as he steps at last from the realm of day-to-day accountability into the long years of political retirement. He will appear at his final Prime Minister’s Question Time a week on Wednesday, then walk into the political sunset — leaving rows about sovereignty, referendums and newspaper editorials behind him once and for all. And Mr Brown will be left with the worst welcome present of all, wrapped in the distinctive blue and gold stars of the European flag.