Long life | 18 October 2012

I have just got back from a few days in Provence, staying with a friend in her delightful house in a hilltop village north of Avignon, where in-between eating and drinking, visiting markets, and going for walks in the autumn sun, I read Peter Paterson’s life of Lord George-Brown, who was Harold Wilson’s mercurial foreign secretary for a brief period in the 1960s. Peter Paterson was a good friend of mine who died last year; but while I had owned his book since it was published in 1993, I had to my shame never actually read it; so thinking it was about time that I did, I took it with me to France.

It has been a splendid reminder of those exciting days when Britain had probably the rudest foreign secretary in its history. Brown was a gifted and forceful minister, who did more than any British politician other than Edward Heath to get us into the European Common Market (now the Nobel Prize-winning European Union), but he was also a drunk and a bully whose outbursts were as undiplomatic as could be.

Though a committed internationalist and Europhile, he was so abusive even to foreigners that he managed to outdo Nigel Farage of Ukip, who among other things told the Belgian President of the European Council, Herman Van Rompuy, in the European Parliament two years ago that he had the ‘charisma of a damp rag’. Brown was even more insulting to Belgians. At a state dinner given by the Belgian government in his honour in 1967, he made a drunken impromptu speech in which he said: ‘While you have been wining and dining here tonight, who has been defending Europe? I’ll tell you who’s been defending Europe — the British Army.