Tories must leave the EPP
From Douglas Carswell MP
Sir: Fraser Nelson should ask himself why Angela Merkel, Nicolas Sarkozy and the rest of Old Europe’s political elite are so desperate to keep the Conservatives in the EPP (Politics, 8 July). It is precisely because they recognise the importance of maintaining their ideological monopoly. Once we Tories, with our free-market allies on the Continent, start arguing for a different kind of Europe, the Euro-elites’ cartel will be broken, and deeper integration will no longer look inevitable.
Those pre-Cameroonian Conservatives lobbying David to shelve his promise need to understand what is at stake. Leaving the EPP is one of the very few commitments that he is in a position to deliver now. If the plan were postponed, Cameron would have reneged on the one promise that he might have kept in opposition. The Labour-supporting commentators who are now arguing that he should drop the whole idea would doubtless be the first, come the general election, to say, ‘You can’t believe a word the Tories say.’
The new model Conservatives stand for the devolution of power to individuals and local communities. We can hardly argue for decentralisation at home while signing up to EPP-style centralisation in the EU. Modernising the party is proving to be far from easy. The old guard, both at home and in Brussels, were bound to be unsettled by change. But leaving the EPP will be the clearest sign that we are not being put off by voices from a previous generation, and that the reformist agenda remains on track.
Douglas Carswell
House of Commons, London SW1
From Frederick Forsyth
Sir: Fraser Nelson was right to say that had Tory extrication from the EPP in Brussels been handled with vigour and skill from the outset, it might by now have triumphed. But he is wrong to say that all is automatically lost. The whole point was not to beg permission from every Tom, Dick and Vaclav, but to create and lead a new grouping clearly dedicated to principled opposition to the worst abuses of Brussels, and to do so in the manner of much-admired British parliamentary democracy.
What Mr Nelson failed to mention was that in 39 years on this planet David Cameron’s knowledge of the fascinating but complex continent to our east is almost zero. And in William Hague he appointed an Atlanticist, not a veteran who knows every stick and stone of Europe. Both appeared bewildered from the outset.
Despite this, all is not necessarily lost. The British Conservatives must cease worrying about the ‘It can’t be done’ brigade and those with a wholly different agenda. They should re-acquire the right to lead a new grouping. They already have the required number of members; all they need now is the support of four other nations. The control would enable them to rebuff the weirdos (and very publicly) and if they acted with dignity and moral courage in a highly corrupted arena, others would come to join. I believe it is called leadership.
And they should stop being terrified of ‘losing influence’. Among those who will never possess influence are those whose eventual capitulation is a foregone conclusion. This has been Britain in Europe for 30 years.
Frederick Forsyth
Hertford
Essay question
From Patrick Pender-Cudlip
Sir: My history pupils never have to fill in ‘boxes’ and they are writing essays by the age of 14. For GCSE History they have to write one (long) essay, and for A-level no fewer than five. Can things be so very different in East Sussex? Perhaps Charles Moore (The Spectator’s Notes, 8 July) is confused because they don’t always call them ‘essays’. Yet few of his fellow columnists would call themselves ‘essayists’, though many tread the path of the ChesterBelloc. My pupils would agree with Mr Moore that ‘history matters’, not least because it helps them to evaluate the seasonal crop of ‘dumbing down’ exam stories while they wait for their results.
Patrick Pender-Cudlip
Yeovil, Somerset
Murder muddle
From Nigel Jones
Sir: Michael Vestey has (understandably) got his Scottish royal murders mixed up. (Radio, 8 July). He writes that Jacques Delors was ‘awed …by being given the room at Holyrood that was the scene of the murder of Mary, Queen of Scots’s lover Darnley’. Well he might have been, since Darnley was the murderer at Holyrood, not the victim. That unfortunate was Mary’s favourite (and possible lover) the Italian musician David Rizzio. The jealous Darnley (Mary’s husband, not her lover) led a group of Scottish lords into the room, dragged the screaming Rizzio away from the pregnant Queen’s skirts and repeatedly stabbed him in an adjoining ante-room.
Darnley’s own demise came some months later at another Edinburgh residence, Kirk O’Fields, when his strangled corpse was found in the garden after the house had been blown up by gunpowder. Mary’s lover (later husband) the Earl of Bothwell was widely suspected of the crime, which led to Mary’s overthrow and her ill-advised flight to England.
Nigel Jones
Lewes, East Sussex
Food for thought
From Angela Mackworth-Young
Sir: To alleviate Paul Johnson’s modern novel starvation (And another thing, 8 July) I suggest that the novels of Rose Tremain, A.S. Byatt, William Golding, John Fowles, Robertson Davies, Andrea Levy, Salley Vickers, Maggie O’Farrell, Sebastian Faulks and Kazuo Ishiguro will all provide him with what he craves, namely ‘cleverness, story and characters’ and a ‘world …[he] can enter pleasurably’. All but three are alive and writing, and those who are dead died between 1993 and 2005.
Angela Mackworth-Young
London SW11
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