The Tories, the EU, and the Stockton connection
It’s strangely appropriate that James Wharton will be the MP who introduces the Conservatives’ bill which would legislate for an In-Out referendum on Britain’s membership of the EU.
For Wharton is the MP for Stockton South, and one of his predecessors (as MP for plain Stockton-on-Tees) was Harold Macmillan. Long after Macmillan lost the seat in 1945 (and later became MP for Bromley) he retained a great affinity for Stockton, and decades later became the Earl of Stockton when he took a hereditary title.
In the spring of 1962, Macmillan took the highly unusual step for a prime minister in those days, of going to Stockton to campaign in a parliamentary by-election. It was all the more unusual a decision in that Stockton was a Labour seat but Macmillan feared the Liberals might push the Tories into third place after their stunning success in the Orpington by-election three weeks before.
A familiar scenario. A prime minister is under electoral pressure from a protest party. And how does he react? He makes a speech on Europe. And in doing so pushes his party onto new ground.
Macmillan’s Stockton speech in April 1962 was arguably almost as important as his Winds of Change speech in South Africa a couple of years earlier. Never before had Macmillan been so forthright is explaining why Britain should join the Common Market (what became the EU): “Of course it has its risks, its pitfalls; all great transactions have.
“What I can now do is to hold out to you the government’s hope of success. Success is securing our Commonwealth interests. Success in securing the interests of our manufacturers and farmers. Success – at the end – in achieving an ever more dynamic influence in the affairs and the future of Western Europe and the Western world. These are high stakes – as high as any that Britain ever contemplated. High stakes – and the prospect of high reward, of peace and security, of rising prosperity and happiness for the British people: all the people.”
Macmillan continued: “The Common Market presents us with a tremendous challenge – and a gigantic opportunity. The government accepts that challenge. It has seized that opportunity. But, of course, we have set about our negotiations with care as well as confidence, with responsibility as well as resource. This is not child’s play. This is high policy – and we know what we are doing.”
Macmillan’s speech received “massive” and “approving” publicity, according to George Hutchinson in his short biography of Macmillan, The Last Edwardian at No 10. But Hutchinson also reveals in his book that he wrote the speech himself, having stiffened up an earlier draft which he’d read on the train to Stockton and thought was “weak on Europe, not sufficiently clear-cut or decisive”. And Macmillan, he says, accepted his new version “at once”.
Three months after his Stockton speech Macmillan met General de Gaulle to start talks about Britain joining the Common Market. Months later, the French president said “Non” to Britain joining.
But in later life the speechwriter had worrying doubts about what he’d got Macmillan to say. George Hutchinson adds in his book (published in 1980) that “having lost some of my earlier enthusiasm for Europe, I am not sure that I still agree with it.”
As for the by-election, the Tories retained second place, but the people of Stockton elected the Labour contender Bill Rodgers, an ardent pro-European who was later one of the Gang of Four who founded the SDP.
(My thanks to Tom Fairbrother for bringing the Stockton connection to my attention.)
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