“On 29 January 2020,” wrote David Harley forgotten tribeA new book on UK MEPs, “As tearful MEPs sing holding hands auld lang cine, Richard Corbett expressed the crushing despair felt by most of his colleagues in Brussels. singing of auld lang cine Nigel Farage’s raucous victory was a successful maneuver to blunt the raw gloating of MEPs.
Corbett is Farage’s nightmare – a sophisticated European, partly brought up in Geneva, before moving to Oxford to study PPE, where he was secretary of the Labor Club and chairman of Oxford for Europe. He coordinated the Oxford student “Yes” campaign in the 1975 referendum, while the National Union of Students, led by Charles Clarke, was campaigning for “No”.
He was policy advisor to the Socialist Group in the European Parliament, and worked with Italian MEP Altiero Spinelli, who wrote during his 10 years in Mussolini’s prisons. For a free and united Europe, who argued that without a European Parliament with real power, another war was inevitable. He was MEP for Merseyside West from 1996 to 1999 and for Yorkshire and Humber from 1999 to 2009 and again from 2014 to 2020.
Corbett and his wife, Lorraine, will largely live in Brussels, the city they have made home and where they can use their fluent French, German and Dutch, and where they call themselves “Brexit refugees”. He also spends time at his constituency home in Shipley, Yorkshire.
At the Labor convention, he was stirring up the case for Europe between receptions and fringe meetings. He did not seem at all deterred by the fact that the Labor leader, Sir Keir Starmer, has ruled out rejoining the EU, and is looking forward to attending this year’s conference, by which time he hopes Their path will be forced upon re-joining. work schedule.
Britain, he points out, now has the largest national section of the European movement of any country on the continent. “If public opinion continues to move towards considering Brexit a mistake, then at least we can repair some of the damage,” he says.
Bill Newton shares Dunn Corbett’s Euro-enthusiasm. He was Conservative MEP for Lincolnshire from 1979 to 1994, then for the East Midlands after 1999. He left the Conservative Party in 2000 due to its growing Euroscepticism, and sat as a Liberal Democrat MEP until 2014, when he lost his seat, before being re-elected in 2019. He was one of the MEPs who sang auld lang cine With Corbett in 2020. He is the only MEP from the first European Parliament in 1979 to still hold a seat.
Like Corbett, he is an admirer of Spinelli and an advocate of a federal Europe. He credits the European Union with bringing him in contact with people you would never find in British politics, such as the Spanish socialist Miguel Martínez. “We wondered why he never wore a tie, then one day we found out. He was in Franco’s prisons, and they hung him by the neck – not to kill, but to torture. I want to work with people like that!”
His taste for politics is as strong as ever, and in May 2018 he was elected to the council in Richmond upon Thames, where he lives.
“I went on the audit committee of council,” he tells me, and manages to make it sound like the most exciting prospect in the world. “The auditors found a lot of mistakes. I picked up on things the auditors were saying. I managed to make some savings and uncover some ruckus.”
In the 2019 general election he threw himself into helping Sarah Olney, the Liberal Democrat candidate for Richmond Park. Her victory, and the fact that the Conservatives are down one seat on Richmond Council, brings her great joy.
His four-year term on Richmond council ended this year, and at the age of 80 he has decided to seek another term. He is writing a memoir of his time in the European Parliament, and no doubt draws on the professional skills of his son, Tom Newton Dunn, its former political editor. Sunday And now a presenter on Talk TV.
She plans to spend more time with Tom, mostly at Arsenal matches, and with their daughter, Daisy, a BBC producer, and their four grandchildren. Political differences have been sidelined: Tom was political editor at a pro-Brexit paper, and in forgotten tribe Tom accurately describes his father as a “hard-core federalist, extreme anti-nationalist, and devout believer in the United States of America”.
Some old Conservative colleagues shunned him, but he was nevertheless invited to the annual dinner for former Conservative MEPs, which took place in November. Tom was the guest speaker, and Stanley Johnson was the fellow guest. “Stanley is very personable, but she’s not overwhelming,” says Newton Dunn.
Johnson, a Conservative MEP from 1979 to 1984, found that he was even later Brexiteer than his son, Boris. After supporting Remain in the 2016 referendum, he changed his mind the following year and then applied for French nationality, to which his mother’s birth entitled him. His daughter, Rachel, writes genomically forgotten tribe,
“It will take a writer of the comedic genius of Spike Milligan to document the true and real story of Johnson’s part in the rise and fall of the European Union; It would take an analyst of Freud’s insight to ascertain whether Brexit was fundamentally an Oedipal conflict that could only be resolved on a continental scale.
Johnson has a website full of things he can sell you: his many books, his stay at his house in Greece (“A Beautiful Villa in a Perfect Location”), as well as his interviews about his famous son. Link.
At the other end of the spectrum – generationally, politically and personally – is Claire Moody. After a career as a trade union official and Prime Minister Gordon Brown’s policy unit, Moody was a Labor MEP representing South West England from 2014 to 2019 and chair of the Labor Movement for Europe from 2017 to 2019.
After 2019 he worked as a lobbyist for Chris Grayling MP before becoming CEO of Equally Our Charity, a network of organizations working for equal opportunities and social justice. Its members are charitable, and it undertakes policy work on matters such as the Bill of Rights and the implications of the removal of EU legislation.
But politics is addictive, and in June last year he was shortlisted for the Labor nomination in the marginal Stroud constituency, losing to local GP Dr. Simon was defeated by the offer. Will she try again? She insists she loves the job she does now, but carefully avoids closing the door on any constituencies that may be looking for a candidate.
Being an MEP was “a fantastic job, I loved doing it,” she says. “I thought that after the 2016 referendum our allies in other European countries might start to relieve us of legislative work, but they haven’t.”
She acknowledges the political reality that “we’re not going to rejoin the next parliament,” but in the long term, “I think it’s going to become a question again. We need the EU for a development agenda.” We have to rebuild the trust that the Conservative government has thrown away.
Perhaps the most dedicated European is Brendan Donnelly, who was elected as the Conservative MEP for Sussex South and Crawley in 1994. He left the Conservatives due to their growing Euroscepticism, and ran unsuccessfully for minor EU parties in 1999, 2009 and 2014.
He is director of the pro-EU Federal Trust, founded in 1945 by William Beveridge, author of the 1943 Beveridge Report, a blueprint for the welfare state. And he is one of the founders of Rejoin.EU, which says: “Brexit is broken and it is breaking Britain. There is an easy way to get back our freedoms, cut our cost of living and our global political Restoring influence. We need to rejoin the EU.” In 2021, Donnelly stood for Rejoin.EU in the London Assembly election and the Chesham and Amersham by-election. “I think it is entirely possible that at the next election, the Conservative Party will be in such a steep decline that everything will be possible,” he told me.
Rejoin.EU has not decided whether to field candidates in the next general election. They don’t want to split the vote and let the Conservatives in, but safe Labor seats could be an option.
He points out that UKIP was dismissed as unimportant, yet it was behind the most important political decision for years. “Ukip’s success can be replicated on the other side,” he says.
The Forgotten Tribe – British MEPs 1979-2020, edited by Diane Hayter and David Harley, John Harper Publishing, £18.
Francis Beckett is an author, journalist, biographer and contemporary historian. He has written biographies of Aneurin Bevan, Clement Attlee, Harold Macmillan, Gordon Brown and Tony Blair.