One of the United Kingdom’s most experienced political journalists confesses herself to be flummoxed and appalled by recent events in the Palace of Westminster
Something about the current state of British politics directed me this week to The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock and T.S. Eliot’s suggestion that he measured out his life with coffee spoons. It was, when I found them, the lines about there being “time yet for a hundred indecisions, And for a hundred visions and revisions” that I was looking for (you can, perhaps, see why). And then, somewhat to my surprise, I realised at this point that my life, at least as a political journalist, has been measured out, not exactly by coffee spoons, or by tea spoons, either, but rather by Britain’s on-again, off-again relationship with Europe.
I started work at Westminster in the very week in October 1971 when the House of Commons first took what we might describe as a “meaningful” vote on the subject. At the time, it was known as the “vote of principle”. On 28 October that year, as I unpacked my pencil case, the House voted by 356 votes to 244 “to approve HMG’s decision of principle to join the European Communities on the basis of the arrangements which have been negotiated”.
Sixty-nine Labour MPs, including the party’s then deputy leader Roy Jenkins, rebelled against the official Opposition front bench and supported Tory Prime Minister Edward Heath’s historic motion. The United Kingdom’s future inside Europe appeared to be settled, as was the political future of Roy Jenkins – or “Le Roi Jean Quinze” as he later came to be known in Brussels. Settled, it soon became clear, was not quite the right word.