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Brexit Interview: Gisela Stuart

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Brexit Interview: Gisela Stuart Gisela Stuart Member of the House of Lords (non-affiliated) October 2018 MP for Birmingham Edgbaston May 1997 – June 2017 Chair, Vote Leave March 2016 – June 2016 UK Parliamentary Representative to the European Convention December 2001 – July 2003 2 November 2020 The Convention on the Future of the European Union UK in a Changing Europe (UKICE): Just looking back on the Convention on the Future of Europe, what impression did it leave on you? Did you find it to be a formative experience in terms of your views of the European Union? Gisela Stuart (GS): Yes, but I think it was formative in two ways. It was formative for me that until the very end I wanted to make this thing work, and arriving at the conclusion that it couldn’t. But I think it was also very formative in terms of UK plc’s approach to the European Union. You see, for the Blair Government at that stage, Blair being the first Prime Minister and probably the only Prime Minister we’ve had so far who regarded Europe as a geopolitical strategic tool. And his commitment to the organisation was not a post-World War II reaction. He saw the proposed constitution as a way of shaping Europe. What’s important in that context is a conversation I had with him just before Christmas, before the invasion of Iraq. When the new President of the Council was muted, and all the small countries were saying this is just the ABC plan, as in Aznar- Blair-Chirac, this is just the big beasts wanting to set up something to Page 1/26 which they could retire. But Blair drove this because he thought there was something inherently wrong with the geometry, the architecture of the EU. And I remember seeing him before Christmas and talking it through, and he said to me, ‘This is now the most important decision which we have to make.’ And I sort of said, ‘Oh, you mean more important than Iraq?’ And he said, ‘Yes, I do mean more important than Iraq, because Iraq’s going to happen whatever we do, whereas this we can shape.’ What then subsequently happened is that his determination to focus and shape Europe was overtaken by Iraq and the fallout. I think if you wanted to find the roots of the Brexit vote, for me, it was actually the Iraq invasion and Blair taking his eye off the ball. Because I think Blair would have been the only one who could have potentially taken his Parliament and his party, as well as Europe, on a different trajectory. UKICE: Were you sent to the Convention with a mandate of what the Blair Government wanted to achieve or was it very much hands off and you were there to apply your own views? GS: It’s important to go with the antecedents. Donald Anderson, as chair of the Foreign Affairs Committee, got a commitment out of Jack Straw who was then Foreign Secretary that, when it came to the Convention on the Future of Europe, it would be members of the Foreign Affairs Committee who would be sent. And the Labour Party decided it would be me. And the Tory Party on the committee decided it would be John Maples. Then, the Tory Party decided, no, it should be David Heathcoat-Amory. So we go off and we, at that stage, are only members. I am then tipped off by a German official that there was an extra place on the Praesidium going. And they said the Praesidium at the moment only had John Kerr there as a Brit and it had no women. So I started this one-woman campaign, supported by Labour women and by this young German official, and said I wanted that extra place. Number 10 didn’t regard that as one of their priorities. But unusually, Number 10 then didn’t object to it. And I ended up on the Praesidium as one of the three representatives of National Parliaments and that of course, was a very Page 2/26 powerful position. At that point, it meant that I never represented the Government because I was reporting back to a newly appointed joint committee in the House of Commons. The Government couldn’t mandate me, but I fully worked with them. I would go and just hand over my notes, and I could always go back in knowing exactly what the situation across Whitehall was. In the very final stages of the negotiations, I had an open phone line to Stephen Wall to make sure things were aligned, but of course John Kerr had his permanent open line. I fell out with the Foreign Office over a couple of things. One was about what we wanted in the text. I wanted an exit clause. I wanted a proper exit clause on the basis that I said whatever this convention comes up with, I can only get this through the Commons with three things. One is we remove” ever closer union”. Two is we have a mechanisms for powers to go up as well as down, and it doesn’t matter that you know what you want to be returned from Brussels, you must have a constitutional mechanism to return powers from Brussels back to member states. And the third one was the exit clause . Number 10 in the end decided to let Gisela have a frolic of her own and not object. What they did object to, which I always wanted, were the traffic lights on subsidiarity. Later this would become Cameron’s great achievement! ‘We’re going to allow national governments to be able to say no.’ Well, this was chucked out in the Convention as not being significant. And the second one, was one involving personnel. The Foreign Office wanted me to take a Foreign Office lawyer with me into the final rounds of negotiations where each one of us had a lawyer with us.I decide to take Speaker’s counsel. And the reason why I wanted to take Speaker’s counsel, and I could and the Foreign Office minister couldn’t, is that Michael Carpenter who, at that time, was Speaker’s counsel, was a Cabinet Office lawyer at the time of Maastricht. So, he could tell me on occasions, ‘Ooh, look at this proposal. They tried that one on John Major.’ He could tell me ‘This is the fourth or fifth time they are trying to do this. I’ve been here before.’ And of course, in terms of one administration not revealing the advice to previous administrations, if I had Page 3/26 been a Foreign Office minister or if I’d had a Foreign Office lawyer I would not have been able to have that advice. There then was this moment, this one phrase in the passerelle clause, which would actually allow for a two-way valve. I’ve still got the piece of paper where Michael Carpenter drafted the text of that. But I think the key thing for looking back on this, the lessons learnt, is that if you want to have treaty negotiations which are much more open, then the convention actually gave a model because it meant you had a parliamentarian doing the negotiations. The House of Commons and the House of Lords was more involved than it had ever been before, and Parliament could have at that moment taken a different route after that. Of course what happened is you get the rejection in the referendums in France and the Netherlands, you get the Lisbon Treaty, you get the party politics, and then in 2010 you get Cameron saying, ‘Well, the only way to deal with any of this is to just stop talking about it.’ So Mini-Corps meetings, where domestic ministers with an EU portfolio talk to each other, stop happening. The notion of a proper Europe Minister goes – i.e. someone who stands at the despatch box and justifies the trade-offs, what at one point Geoff Hoon thought he’d been appointed to. The agriculture and fisheries debates go because they’re now deemed backbench business. Debates in the House of Commons ahead of Council meetings go. And you have from 2010 onwards, not just a Government disengaged, you also have a Parliament disengaged. And remember, between 2010 and 2015 you have the biggest churn of MPs since 1945. So, you’ve got a whole generation of new Members of Parliament who do not speak Europe and have no means of learning it either. UKICE: I can see the link between the Convention and the growing sense of Euroscepticism, but when in your mind did that firm up into the idea that we had to leave? GS: Well, no, it never did in my mind. Being realistic about this, I desperately wanted a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty because I thought the Lisbon Treaty was a real change in the democratic relationship. And what’s more a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty would have given you very, very clear options Page 4/26 between the present and the future. You make the choice, you either vote for the status quo or you reject the version of the future that is being offered to you in the shape of the Lisbon Treaty. You will not find me campaigning for an in- out referendum after the 2005 Lisbon Treaty, but on the Lisbon Treaty I wanted a referendum, yes. And then you get the Cameron referendum, which sort of comes out of nowhere.
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