The european union

Why did the United Kingdom leave the European Union? Perhaps it might be better to ask why did it ever join. Tom McTague attempts to answer both questions in this panoramic history of British – and continental – politics from 1942 to the present day. It is to the author’s great credit that he approaches a debate which has polarised politics and shattered friendships with disciplined, but never anaemic, detachment. It is hard to think of many books which leave one admiring both Edward Heath and Enoch Powell more. McTague has set himself a formidable task in seeking to explain the two most consequential decisions of British postwar politics. That he does so not just with fair-mindedness but mastery of narrative sweep and fresh perspective makes this a significant achievement.

Just as one is inclined to believe Carlyle’s point that the history of the world is but the biography of great men, so Christopher Tugendhat, in this level-headed account, is right to conclude that the history of the Conservative party in the past 60 or 70 years has been deeply affected by the biography of the movement for the European Union. And it would have shocked Carlyle that a great woman – Margaret Thatcher – played a central part and, according to Tugendhat, altered the course of the party’s relationship with Europe. She was certainly central to the debate, not least because rather too many Conservatives felt she had died a martyr’s political death in 1990 when she was forced from Downing Street by people they regarded as treacherous pro-Europeans.

Robert Tombs’s new book is not long: 165 pages of argument, unadorned by maps or images. But brevity is good, and we pick it up expecting much insight, because its predecessor was so wonderful. In The English and Their History (2015), Tombs, a scholar of French, not English, history, boldly saw the wood where specialists saw only the trees. Surely, he said, England should have a history of its own. The election had just signalled that England-and-Wales might soon be a separate polity for the first time since 1707. Tombs delivered a timely and gripping investigation of this land, so filled with marks of continuity, yet prone to occasional, apparently inexplicable, bouts of implosion.