Flying Free (28 page)

His biography reads like that of one of those academic Catholic clerics
who quietly work their way up through the Vatican hierarchy simply by being quiet and cleverish and making few enemies. A classicist with an interest in youth clubs and a penchant for writing minor but unexceptionable verse, he found himself elevated to parish priest (by appointment, not election) then bishop of the funny little parish of Belgium because it was falling apart.

The resemblance to the ill-fated Pope John Paul I, elected on the fourth ballot because the Conservatives and the Liberals could not find an acceptable candidate of distinction, is striking.

First the Flemish, French and German-speaking components of the Belgian population had voted for irreconcilable parties, so the King called in Van Rompuy to lead a government of sorts. Then the European Union thrashed around to find someone wholly inoffensive to represent a Union which is anything but united.

Tony Blair was much touted, but he was a high-profile warmonger whose inability to discern the dowdy plumage of facts from the gaudy splendour of phantasms was universally known. It wasn't that colour-blindness disqualified him. It was the fact that the world knew of the affliction. Besides, Britain had opted out of the Schengen agreement and the single currency.

Nicolas Sarkozy and Angela Merkel both had far better things to do at home. They bottled it, and anyhow, the long-term Franco-German dominance of the EU has always inspired mistrust and resentment amongst other member states.

So once again, an obscure seminarist found himself elevated to high office as an inoffensive compromise.

In my childhood, before the British people discovered how wines were meant to taste, there was a craze for Mateus Rosé, whose principal merit lay in the fact that it was neither red nor white, still nor fizzy, dry nor sweet. It could thus offend no one save those who sought character and distinction. To them, of course, it was profoundly offensive.

Of such is Herman Van Rompuy: the Mateus Rosé leader.

And that day, when at last, five months after his appointment, he deigned to pay the EU Parliament a visit, all that I meant to say was just that: ‘Er, sorry. Who are you?'

This was a reasonable question, I think, to an unelected man from an
almost-nation, presuming (along with the inept Baroness Ashton who has never been elected to
anything)
to usurp the sovereign power of the British people in Parliament and the peoples of every other member state, to overrule the stated wishes of the people of Holland, France and Ireland and to impose their project by coercion and bureaucratic
force majeure…

But oh dear. A speaker who wings it is always a hostage to fortune.

I have always spoken unscripted.

It's a bit like being a chef, I suppose. Naturals cook by touch, responding to their moods, to the qualities of the key ingredients, to barometric pressure – to the moment – and so make their creations infinitely more interesting than the mass-produced, identical dishes served up by those who abide by formulae.

Unfortunately, it takes just one bungling sous-chef or washer-up and a distracting flash of irritation for everything to go just slightly awry.

I confess that, to my mind, everything went slightly awry on that day.

I still feel that the so-called Parliament should be a damned sight more robust.

For all the calm, balanced speeches of Canning and Burke as read in the tranquil, flickering firelight and the rules of parliamentary debate (among the most beautiful of human inventions), real democracy is seldom refined. If the mob is not permitted into the chamber with its dead cats, eggs and other missiles, its representatives certainly are. Passions can and should run high.

By the time Rumpy had finished his dirge-like maiden speech to the Parliament on that day, my passions were running high.

His was not the cocky, braying triumphalism of the City trader nor did he have the steely arrogance of the aristocrat. It was something far, far more provocative. It was the meek but invulnerable, smirking complacency of the prim little sister who knows that the parents are just yards away, that same, unthinking smugness that you find in airline officials and telecom operators who droningly reiterate the regulations at you, incapable of apology and impervious to personal grief or distress. Even a good joke cannot penetrate such a carapace.

He was President. This entire institution was there to assure him that he was right. All dissent was, by diktat and by definition, wrong and probably a result of mental illness.

My harangue was spontaneous. It sprang straight from the heart.

In general, I avoid arguments
ad hominem,
but the insignificance of the
homo
in question was the crucially important subject of my speech. Sadly, too, the European Parliament does not favour debate through the chair. It prefers direct, face-to-face address. I could not therefore address my remarks to anyone else, referring to my subject in the third person, but must resort to the far more offensive second person.

‘Would you not agree, Mr Chairman, that Mr Van Rompuy has all the charisma of a damp rag and the appearance of a low-grade bank clerk?' is just mild, discerning expression of a valid aesthetic appreciation. Even the most scrupulously impartial chair would, after appraising Rumpy, have nodded.

Alas, what I actually said sounded a little impolite, nor does it help that the microphones picked up only my words, not the barrage of barracking over which I spoke:

This caused Martin Schulz to have his usual practised apoplexy. Rumpy just sat there looking bemused, affronted and sad like an embarrassed father listening to the rantings of a demented child from behind a reinforced glass screen. He pursed his lips only when I said,

At this, he started to rub his nose. This is a gesture I have observed in the Japanese when they are asked, for example, for their personal opinions rather than those of the corporation or the State. It means, I think, ‘Me. He is talking to me, not the institution from which I derive my protection and my identity…'

OK. It did come out as a faintly childish jibe. It was intended to be a just appraisal of a nation designed on a drawing board (a British drawing board, as the egregious Herr Schulz later pointed out to me) rather than evolved by popular consensus.

Belgium has not had a government since 13 June 2010 and, at the time of writing, shows no sign of co-operating sufficiently ever to have such a thing again. It is a non-country, a Frankenstein's monster in which the Flemish head no longer talks to and certainly cannot work with the French groin. It has no national newspaper, no national political party. It might profitably serve as a microcosmic model of the similarly artificial European Union, and is similarly breaking up into its constituent parts.

That is what I meant to say, but I was angry and rattled.

Ah, well.

That weekend the Belgian media went berserk in two languages. Martin Schulz demanded my expulsion (a strange form of democracy this, where an elected member can be expelled for evoking distaste or disapproval in a dissenting member) for the hundredth time.

On the Monday morning, I was promptly ‘invited' in for an interview with the Parliament's President, Jerzy Buzec, the former Prime Minister of Poland. This was what I have come to call ‘an interview without coffee'.

He told me that yet again I had gone too far. I pleaded in my defence that he should take a look at other truly democratic parliaments. He should study, for example, the wit and wisdom of Dennis Skinner in the British Commons. ‘The Beast of Bolsover' memorably branded David Owen ‘a pompous sod' (he withdrew ‘pompous' when ticked off by the speaker) and called John Gummer ‘slimy' and ‘a wart'.

In Australia, the words ‘dumbo' and ‘liar' were only deemed unparliamentary in 1997, whilst Dáil Éireann – the Irish Parliament – having systematically and reluctantly banned ‘buffoon', ‘chancer', ‘coward',
‘fascist', ‘fatty', ‘gurrier', ‘guttersnipe', ‘hypocrite', ‘rat' and ‘scumbag', was still in 2010 mulling over the status of ‘fuck'.

I pointed out that Buzek himself had fought for free speech in Communist Poland and that free speech surely included comparing people to rags. He was not impressed by my arguments. He required me to apologise to Rumpy, to the EU Parliament and to the people of Belgium, not, it seemed, for the references to Rumpy's appearance nor for declaring him to be the assassin of democracy but for insulting Belgium. I was mildly surprised that he did not require me to apologise to the entire world.

I refused.

I declared, however, that, on sober reflection, I owed an apology to bank clerks the world over.

So he imposed the maximum fine at his disposal – the same penalty that I would have received had I accepted a £100,000 bribe from a lobbyist – the loss of ten days' expenses' allowance.

On my return to Britain, I found embarrassment to be the prevailing emotion. That a nicely brought up English boy should behave so churlishly to such a mild-looking old chap was, well, positively unacceptable.

No matter that that mild-looking old chap presumed to overrule their power to govern themselves and to assume arbitrary, unaccountable power over 500,000,000 people who had not voted to give it to him. One should still behave nicely, Nigel.

On
Question Time
in Cardiff that night, Janet Street-Porter, whose kneereflexes are in remarkably fine fettle considering, promptly accused me of racism, though she declined to say whether I had it in for the Flemish or the Walloons and gazed at me in blank incomprehension when I asked her.

Michael White of
The Guardian
had his breakfast interrupted by my strident tones. He conceded that I was ‘rude but right'. That seemed to be the general consensus amongst those whose opinions I value.

Simon Hoggart later summed it all up in
The Guardian:

And I had knocked over the cake stand.

So OK. I regret nothing that I said that day, but I concede that my tone was just a trifle ripe for middle England. Annabelle Fuller, our former Press Officer, rang to console me and pointed out that all would not be lost if we were to print ‘damp rag' tea-towels. These have proved hugely successful.

Alas, the speech upset the middle-class shire Tories. Any charm offensive which I might have essayed was doomed.

Forget botox. If you want to look twenty-five years younger, just stand up in public and behave disrespectfully to the meekest, most desiccated looking little man that you can find. Forget that Rumpy was only sixteen years my senior and possessed the unearned, arbitrary power of a late Roman Emperor whilst I was the leader of a tiny ramshackle band of dissidents. I was at once perceived as a leather-clad teddy boy menacing a nun.

Had he been a Bill Clinton, say, it would have been good old rumbustious parliamentary debate. If I had looked like old man Steptoe, it would have seemed a harmless tiff in the geriatric ward. As it was, I had offended (if sometimes amused) everyone over the age of sixty. One consolation, however, is that the speech has proved a huge YouTube hit and has attracted many younger viewers and voters who realise that they have been sold out by their pompous seniors.

Memo to self: wear cheap shirts and ill-fitting suits and look like Sven-Göran Eriksson with the air let out, and you can ruin millions of lives and still earn only a sympathetic ‘Aaaaw!'

I was reminded of Noël Coward's
Don't Let's Be Beastly to the Germans:

My second mistake lay in underestimating the sheer size of the new constituency. From its northernmost point to its southernmost was a 75-minute drive. The suburban areas were easy enough to cover, but reaching the innumerable beautiful little villages at the constituency's heart was taxing.

And then there was John Stevens, who ran for election simply in order to thwart me by splitting the anti-Bercow vote.

Stevens is a former Conservative MEP and a dedicated servant of the Europroject. As one time Vice Chairman of the European Parliament's Economic & Monetary Affairs Committee, he will soon have the honour of having been one of the minor midwives to the shortest-lived currency in modern history.