Philip Hammond PH : No. PH : Politicians are not always purely reactive. David Cameron, if you go back to the Bloomberg speech, I think was trying to do two things. He was trying to shape the debate and trying to head off a UKIP threat, but he was also trying to apply pressure to the Europeans.
We always assumed, I think β pretty much all of us β that, although there was noise out there about a referendum and the EU, the economic case was so clear-cut in our minds that, if it was ever tested, people would vote with their pocketbook rather than their emotions: first mistake. In a sense, I think quite a lot of the Bloomberg speech was designed to prepare the ground for a campaign in Europe.
PH : I think they were probably a bit sceptical and a bit less enthusiastic about the renegotiation. By this stage, the Cabinet Office had control of Europe policy so the Foreign Office was not the lead department. I spent a lot of my time, as Foreign Secretary, urging the Foreign Office to react to what appeared to me as a systematic humiliation over the years β having first lost its role in relation to Europe, to the Cabinet Office Europe Unit and then surrendered many of its functions to the National Security Council.
I thought that the Foreign Office needed to re-think its role and work out how it was going to rebuild its stature. PH : Maybe. He had good lines directly into UKRep in Brussels that was always pretty well plugged in.
I think we all did. We all interpreted German pragmatism as support for a more British view of the future of Europe. That was clearly not correct, so we definitely overestimated the flexibility of the Europeans. I think the other thing that the British establishment β at least the British political class β has systematically done is underestimated the influence of the French in the Brussels machinery.
