Flying Free (13 page)

That June evening when the election results came in marked a quite extraordinary transition. UKIP had won 7 per cent of the poll, the Lib Dems 10 per cent, Labour a pathetic 28 per cent and the Tories 35.8 per cent. We had three seats, allotted to Michael Holmes, Jeffrey Titford – and Nigel Farage.

At one point that evening, I escaped the champagne corks and the congratulations, the flashing cameras and the television and press interviewers (to whom we were suddenly inordinately interesting although they had ignored our existence throughout the campaign), sat by myself in a plain white room and covered my face with my hands.

I had fought to this point simply because I passionately believed in the cause. I had attained popularity because I liked people and prominence because – well, I felt as though I had discovered a new land simply because waves kept pushing me towards the shore so I had kept on diving through them.

And now I had not a clue how I was going to cope.

Most good stories are
Cinderella
in one form or another. There is misfortune and injustice. Our virtuous, blushing heroine obtains what she has always dreamed of. Further adversities afflict her and her original misery is compounded. Then, by merit of virtue or shoe-size, she triumphs.

I was never cut out to play Cinderella. In June, 1999, I was granted admission to a ball which I had only seen in nightmares in a palace whose very existence I deplored. So far from moving from servitude amongst the cinders to the warmth and glitter of the ball, I had been earning a great deal and disporting myself amongst friends until I attained victory, instantly lost a fortune and henceforth found myself amongst people whom I found distinctly uncongenial.

For at least two minutes, I laughed like a loon.

Then I got down to some serious celebration.

My first live media interview was with Phil Hornby of Meridian TV. ‘Well, Nigel,’ he said, ‘you said you’d do it. Very few people believed it, but you’ve done it. So, from now on, it’s going to be endless lunches, lavish dinners and champagne receptions. Will you be corrupted by the lifestyle?’

‘No,’ I told him with a shrug and a grin. ‘I’ve always lived like that.’

David Lott drew me aside at some point in the evening. ‘Your life’s just changed forever, Nigel,’ he said.

I nodded. It was an obvious statement, I suppose, but I had never truly considered just how much it was to change. My hobby had outgrown everything else in my life. No less than Antony by his passion for a woman, I had been borne by the surge of my own passion from familiar shores to a new, bewildering, intimidating territory of which I knew next to nothing.

Just how bewildering and intimidating I was about to discover.

We travelled to Brussels on Eurostar, accompanied by BBC cameras which nosed in on our table suddenly and unexpectedly. We opened a bottle of champagne, partly just because we wanted to celebrate, partly because it gave us something to do with our mouths other than putting our inexpert feet in them and with our hands other than scratching, nose-picking or whatever.

The cameras were there because we were the wild men from the hills, the hillbillies who somehow made it to Washington. No doubt the producers were hoping that we would attempt to extinguish the steak Diane with the contents of the ice-bucket and all the other clichés of the genre. Astoundingly, we managed to avoid such solecisms.

Although we did not yet know it, we would receive £600 apiece from our new employers for this journey whether we wanted it or not. The cost of the return fare was, I think, £99, but the EU does not care. After all, it is only your money, and we were no longer ordinary people. We were members of the club now – the ruling class.

The complex of buildings which constitutes the EU Parliament (or one of its three homes, since, even at the outset, leaders could not agree where their capital should be, so decided to have two) is vast, impersonal and deliberately intimidating to all save its members whose confidence is thereby enhanced. Its construction alone has so far cost you £700 million and we’re still counting.

It was built on the site of a very much cheaper brewery, which was surely a more useful purpose for so large an area of God’s earth.

It is a building without a focal point or a narrative dynamic in its design. Millions of things move about you rather than your moving through them. It is like being a flea caught in a monochrome kaleidoscope or a goldfish released into the depths of the ocean, looking about and wondering in which patch of weed and at which of the countless mysterious levels refuge can be fond.

The doorways gaping onto snaking walkways give it much in common with a conventional prison, only here the prisoners all wear suits and mill this way and that, murmuring importantly in many tongues. Where prisons thrum and echo, the sounds here are muffled but nonetheless continuous.

It is the world’s worst signposted building. Usually I loathe signs. Believe it or not, I do not need to have the landscape ruined by cartoon screams of ‘STOP’, ‘PASSING PLACE’ or ‘VIEWPOINT’. A building like this, however, where everyone (bar the Commission) must be seen to be equal and so in identical offices on identical landings, needs more signs than a city modelled on a Pollock painting.

There was no Virgil to guide us through this inferno. We just gawped and wandered in and out of the propaganda shop and wondered if the whole election had in fact been a fantastically elaborate charade and all these bustling Eurocrats were about to point and laugh at the presumptuous British businessmen and chant ‘Nanananana’ – only in French. It was my first day as a ‘new bug’ at Dulwich all over again.

At last we found an officious looking man in a uniform, explained that we were new members of the parliament and, after he had flapped through a long, long list, were directed to the right suite of rooms. We realised as we climbed into the bulimic’s pill-capsule lift that, of course, this so-called parliament was intended to be a cosy continuum. There was no protocol for new parties. Members died or resigned and were replaced without election.

We were ‘inducted’ and equipped with identification badges and security passes, then led by an exceptionally pretty Dutch girl to our offices.

I laid down my briefcase and looked around. It was really quite pleasant. There was a desk. There were chairs. There was a bookcase. There were filing-cabinets and computers. I said, ‘Splendid. Thank you very much…’

‘No, no,’ she corrected. ‘This will be your assistant’s office.’

She led me on into a larger room, similarly equipped but with a lot more space, a grander desk, a chaise-longue and a shower. Since we were not permitted to doss there overnight, this seemed to me to suggest an obsession for cleanliness during working hours or, perhaps, a courteous provision for
ententes
so
cordiales
as to necessitate ablution. I shower daily but have never in ten years used that expensive facility in my workplace.

Having distributed Rolodexes and framed photographs of children about our offices, we met up again and wondered just what to do next. We were not even strictly MEPs yet. Whereas at Westminster succession is instantaneous and a constituency is never without a representative, we would only be MEPs if we survived until July when we could take up our seats. In the meantime, the South East, the South West and Eastern regions of England were unrepresented.

As if they cared.

We had no staff, no agenda, no idea what we should do. We had, however, a few contacts with fellow Eurosceptics from other reluctant member-states.

At last we met someone who actually knew who we were. Ole Krarup, a Professor of Law at Copenhagen University who had been an MEP for the left-wing People’s Movement against the EU since 1994 arose from his seat and bellowed, ‘Ah! Welcome to the charade, my friends!’

And charade it was. Charade it is, its sole purpose to furnish an illusion of democracy.

No measure originates in this parliament. There is no such thing as a Private Member’s Bill. Every single directive and regulation is conceived by the unelected Commission, drafted by unelected Eurocrats and handed down to the parliament for form’s sake. No such measure is ever rejected for long.

The EU is a serial date-rapist. It does not understand the word ‘No’ or accept rejection of its advances. When referendums in member-states have demonstrated clear opposition to further integration, the EU has simply poured another drink down the dissenter’s throat, taken a deep breath, growled, ‘You don’t really mean that, my dear’, grasped her by her privy parts and insisted that what she really meant was ‘Yes’.

So too, should the parliament in some drug-induced fit of rebelliousness actually vote against a Commission motion, it will be subjected to a process known as ‘conciliation’ whereby the vote will simply be overturned and the original reinstated.

Our total irrelevance was made clear from the outset by the very fact that the parliamentary committees were busy drawing up our agendas on our first day in Brussels. They were working a directive whose first and second readings had already taken place in a previous parliament, but bills do not fall with a dissolution as in any other parliament. They have nothing to do with the beliefs of members. They just keep on rolling along in eternal spate. We, the MEPs, are just interchangeable twigs on the surface. The cast might change, but the plot and text of the play remain unaltered.

Our first task was to find or form a parliamentary group. Without a group, we would be ‘unattached’ – an unattractive proposition because it means sitting alone with only the far right, anarchists and sexual or religious obsessives for company. Within a group, you share briefings, intelligence, speaking time and mutual support. You have a professional secretariat.

Unfortunately, in order to be able to enjoy these benefits, you had to find eighteen members from a minimum of five member-states. These must be broadly congenial – which, in our case, meant anti-EU-centralisation – and, if unconventional, not so barking mad as to cause embarrassment by the very fact of association.

Quite a tall order, as the Tories have recently found.

Fortunately, we had friends not merely in Ole but in Jens-Peter Bonde, the urbane, veteran Danish MEP who had been in the parliament since the first ever election in 1979 and knew his way through the physical labyrinth and its labyrinthine procedures as well as anyone living.

Jens-Peter was another man of the left. He had originally been elected as member for the People’s Movement Against the EU before founding the June Movement in 1992. He and his wife Lisbeth Kirk ran the well-informed Eurosceptic insiders’ website EUObserver.com. He
had monitored our progress in Britain and now introduced us to other natural friends.

Notable amongst these was the charismatic Jean Saint-Josse of the French Chasse, Pêche, Nature et Traditions party. They brought six members to the group. Their principal raison d’être was that the shooting of songbirds in February had lately been banned. They liked shooting songbirds in February, regarding it as just one of many agrarian traditions under threat. More to the point, they disputed that anyone on earth had the right to stop them. We did not share their tastes, but we shared their view as to the liberty of French hunters to do what they would when they would on their own terrain.

Jean was one of the few characters in this institution of ciphers. He was Gallic to his nicotine-stained fingertips. He chain-smoked continuously. His lunches were interminable. He demanded a coffee-cup with the aperitif and then filled it with fag-ends as the meal and the operatic debates wore on and on.

He was to stand in the 2002 French presidential elections. One night two months before the poll, when a British politician would surely have been busy being photographed with a fixed grin as he tried to recall his children’s names and the geography of his local church, Jean casually said to me, ‘Do you want to come out with us tonight?’

I had nothing else planned, so I shrugged, smiled and accepted the invitation. The presidential candidate took us to a very friendly private hostess club. A couple of years later, Richard North, who had been of our party that night, sensationally revealed to the newspapers that I had been to this apparently disreputable establishment. This was apparently news in Britain.

Similarly, the Combats Souverainistes (Fighters for Sovereignty) of France, the orthodox Protestant Dutch ChristenUnie-SGP and a couple of Calvinists, though all separated by ideology, faith and personality – as was only natural for parties from such diverse sources – were united in their insistence that they were entitled to hold their beliefs.

I am not given to Morris dancing, eating blowfish or hiking about Britain in a beard and a dayglo anorak with a telescopic stick, but, perhaps
to labour a point, I will die for your freedom to do these things (even the last, offensive though it be).

I am Christian in the normal English way – I love communing with my ancestors who built the mighty English church and who lie in its churchyard. I like to hear the glorious words which they too heard from 1604 onward and to bellow along to
Hymns Ancient and Modern
(but spare me – and God – all that patronising ‘Shine, Jesus, Shine’ drivel). I approve of Jesus. He seems a decent sort who liked his wine and the company of riff-raff, knew when to pick up the whip and set about him and displayed exemplary manners with that girl caught enjoying a little light relief.

I have precious little, in short, in common with orthodox Dutch Protestants with supposedly moral views on how you amuse yourself in bed or how you deal with the consequences. Provided, however, that they merely seek to express these views and not to enforce them, I will defend them from those who attempt to silence them.

The parliamentary group system makes for strange bedfellows, but hey, they were no stranger than Flat Earth Society members and they too deplored the unelected establishment which wished to legislate them out of existence, so, on the important things at least, we were agreed.

So we formed the EDD – the Europe of Democracies and Diversities – and thus won, on average, seven to ten minutes’ speaking-time a day to be divided between sixteen of us. In a really good week, we UKIP MEPs would be permitted to speak for precisely ninety seconds apiece twice a week.

But then, as we were to discover when we went to Strasbourg, where the actual parliament sits, debate – another notion at the heart of parliamentary democracy – is not permitted here. A Canning, a Fox or a Burke would pass unnoticed – just another functionary, eloquence or expertise irrelevant to the process. Just as he was warming to his subject, his microphone would be switched off and the interpreters in their smoked glass booths would start translating the next poor bloody Spaniard’s or Dane’s ninety seconds or nip off for a fag.

I sat there with my calculator on that first day and worked it all out. I was allowed to make just twenty-eight speeches a year – forty-two minutes’
speaking-time. Once overheads are taken into account, an MEP costs the taxpayer £1,200,000 a year. That works out at £500 a second – a damned expensive sniff or hiccough. A pregnant pause can cost more than a pregnant lover.

Given that, when asked what he does in his homeland, an honest British MEP will probably allude to a certain Fanny Adams who was murdered near Alton in 1867, I suggest that your hard-earned money might be better spent.

Here it has gone into constructing and equipping these monstrous buildings. A further million pounds an hour pays innumerable useless but fat employees. Not a penny goes to representing your views or to defending constituents whose health, freedom, livelihood or life may be imperilled. Such concerns are irrelevant impediments to the great homogenisation process.

The EU is a team, for God’s sake. No room for individuals here. You remember the old definition of a rowing team? ‘Eight men with but a single thought … if that’?

Well, that’s what we are meant to be. Unthinking, dutiful oars. What does it matter that stroke has chest-pains or cox’s family traditionally hosts a reunion today? How can these compare with the interests of the boat as a whole? This programme can work only if all the players act as one.

When idealists speak dreamily of ‘global accord’, ‘global resolve’ and even ‘global leaders’, supposedly in response to environmental threats whose existence is questionable or to terrorist threats no graver than they have ever been, I suggest that they look at the EU as the model of global government – unaccountable, unresponsive, unconnected to the constituents who entrusted it with power – and consider how and by whom ‘global law’ may be made and enforced … and shudder.

Today’s Blofelds caress doped snow-tigers, not Persian cats. Rosa Klebb wears frocks with little mirrors on them. They both have secret shares in McDonald’s and Coca-Cola. They are dedicated MEPs.