It is two months since British voters surprised themselves by deciding to end the UK’s 43-year relationship with the European Union – “independence day” to some and “the worst political decision since 1945” to others.

As stunned political leaderships on both sides of the Channel continue dithering about what to do next, it is worth looking back at the origins of a crisis the EU elite had not expected.

1) It may have started with Harold Macmillan’s father taking the future prime minister to watch Queen Victoria’s diamond jubilee parade in 1897. Aged just three, Macmillan was very impressed by its splendour, but years later he would tell audiences that the pomp and power had been “all an illusion”. Two world wars (Macmillan was wounded in both) and the Great Depression put paid to it. The answer was a Europe that replaced old enmities with cooperation, he decided. But in 1955 Anthony Eden was PM and clung to old illusions. His government sent no minister – only a middling trade official named Russell Bretherton – to the summit in Messina, Italy, that led to the 1957 Treaty of Rome. Britain missed the boat. The French president, Charles de Gaulle, regarded Britain as an American Trojan horse and vetoed Macmillan’s first bid to join in 1963 and Harold Wilson’s in 1967.

2) After De Gaulle’s retirement, Ted Heath achieved entry for Britain on 1 January 1973, splitting both the Labour and Tory parties in the process. Key policies such as fishing and farming had not been designed to meet UK needs, and some people were worried about pooling aspects of sovereignty with the “Common Market” six. They were now nine, as Ireland and Denmark joined too, but Norwegians voted against membership. Heath was a hopeless salesman. When he lost power in 1974, Labour’s Wilson embraced Tony Benn’s idea of a referendum to legitimise British membership. With most of Fleet Street and the new Tory leader, Margaret Thatcher, on his side, Wilson won heavily by a margin of two to one against a coalition of rightwing Tories, Bennites and much of the Labour movement. Union leaders saw the economically booming Europe as a capitalist plot.



3) The Common Market evolved into the European Economic Community (EEC) and membership expanded, taking in former dictatorships Spain, Greece and Portugal in the 1980s, neutrals and ex-Soviet bloc countries after the end of the cold war. It would be 28 in all when Croatia joined in 2013. To keep growing, Europe needed to reduce tariff barriers and in 1986 signed the Single European Act (SEA), which committed members to free movement of goods, capital, services and people in a “single market” by 1992. Acknowledging emerging fears of a “democratic deficit”, the SEA also gave the elected European parliament greater powers. But it also replaced national vetoes with qualified majority voting on many decisions in the EEC’s council of ministers. Denmark’s parliament rejected the SEA, but it was endorsed by a referendum, as it was in Ireland. An opponent of referendums, Thatcher did not hold a British referendum and only later regretted that she had been deceived by the “federalist conveyor belt”.

Margaret Thatcher made her Bruges speech in 1988 opposing economic and political union Photograph: ANL/REX/Shutterstock

4) The next signpost on the road to what EU integrationists hoped would be “ever closer union” was to set up a single currency. By now Thatcher was vocally against such a move and in 1988 made her Bruges speech opposing economic and political union, but backing cooperation between nation states. (It was not meant as a Brexit speech, aides would stress in 2016). Meanwhile Labour’s modernisers, led by Neil Kinnock, had reversed the party’s opposition to EU membership. They had been wooed by the vision of a high-wage workers’ Europe promoted by Jacques Delors, the visionary French socialist who was president of the powerful Brussels bureaucracy, the European commission. After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 opened up the prospect of German reunification, the French insisted on a currency union to tie an ever more dominant Germany to the EU project. Britain wanted the project to be “broader, not deeper” by expanding eastwards. Both policies were implemented; both would later have fateful consequences.



5) As Thatcher’s power weakened she quarrelled with key allies such as Geoffrey Howe and Nigel Lawson over Europe. But her new chancellor, John Major, persuaded her to link sterling to the European exchange rate mechanism (ERM) at what some feared was too high a rate for British industry. When Thatcher fell, Major took over and negotiated British opt-outs from the Maastricht treaty (1992), which reorganised the EU and set timetables and rules for a single currency zone and for the no-passport Schengen zone. As part of Major’s “variable geometry” strategy for a two-speed Europe, Britain was also allowed not to join the “social chapter” covering workers’ rights. Denmark needed two referendums before signing; France’s was only narrowly carried. Major won the 1992 election, but opposition to Europe crystallised at this time into demands for an in/out referendum on UK membership. The sterling crisis of September 1992 forced Britain out of the ERM. The economy recovered, but not Major’s reputation. What became Ukip was founded and Major’s government was hobbled by backbench “Eurosceptic” rebellions, billionaire Jimmy Goldsmith’s Referendum party and Thatcher’s criticisms. BSE (“mad cow disease”) turned into an ugly beef war with Europe.

6) Major’s EU problems helped Tony Blair pile up a 179-seat majority in 1997 as the most pro-European PM since Heath. Labour talked a positive game on Europe, but Fleet Street had moved against it in line with rightwing public opinion, and Blair never dared expend much political capital making the positive case for Europe. Instead his turf war with Gordon Brown ensured that the chancellor imposed a near-impossible “five tests” of the British national interest before he would consent to sterling joining the euro, whose coins and notes were launched in 2002. Labour joined the “social chapter” that Major had blocked, but fell out with most of its EU partners over UK support for the US-led invasion of Iraq. The French were denounced as “cheese-eating surrender monkeys”.

7) Serious strategic mistakes were then made on both sides of the Channel. Labour decided not to impose transitional restrictions on the free movement of workers when mostly former Soviet bloc states known as the A10 joined the EU on 1 May 2004, unaware that France and Germany would do so. Instead of the estimated 13,000 annual arrivals expected, mostly from Poland, more than a million came in the years that followed. It allowed Ukip to capitalise on fears of wage competition, pressure on social services and cultural resentment in many areas, pushing the Tories to the right. Labour failed to respond to fears shared by many of its supporters. Tony Blair promised a referendum on the EU “constitution” but ducked it when French and Dutch voters said no. Resentment grew when a version of the constitution became the Lisbon treaty (2009).



8) When the global banking crisis began in mid-2007, initially in France and Britain, it was blamed by many in Brussels on irresponsible “Anglo-Saxon” speculative banking. But US and British central bankers proved much more nimble in restructuring and bailing out troubled banks than the EU did at both national and eurozone level. At Germany’s insistence, a tough line was taken against eurozone states, notably Greece, Ireland, Spain and Portugal – “peripheral” economies that had borrowed heavily on the new currency’s credibility to launch unsustainable booms. The subsequent austerity regime crippled Greece and killed growth elsewhere. Free to devalue and with flexible labour laws, Britain was able to navigate the crisis more adroitly. Badly hit by the rising economic power of Asia, the eurozone looked less like an engine of growth than one of stagnation, and some of its banks a submerged problem that leaders tried to ignore.



David Cameron hoped he could sell the economic case for continued EU membership. Photograph: Facundo Arrizabalaga/EPA

9) David Cameron had won the Tory leadership in 2005 by outflanking his main rival, David Davis, over Europe, promising to quit the main conservative group of MEPs. After becoming prime minister in 2010 he talked tough, but Eurosceptic colleagues never trusted him and used his appeasement tactics to demand more. Despite investing less effort and manpower at the Brussels negotiating table, Britain was winning key battles, its language had now replaced French, its approach to law and free trade gained ground and it was outside the floundering eurozone and Schengen’s border free-for-all. It was already half out. But that was not enough for critics. Ahead of the 2015 election Cameron promised an in/out referendum after a “renegotiation” (the tactic Wilson had used in 1975), probably expecting Nick Clegg to veto it again in a renewed coalition. Instead he won an outright majority and decided to resolve the issue early, in 2016 rather than 2017.



10) Cameron’s elevation of party management tactics over strategy was rapidly compounded by a perfect storm for what became known as the Brexit campaign. Tory promises to reduce net immigration from about 300,000 to below 100,000 repeatedly failed, weaponising the “Take Back Control” slogan. Middle East wars (in which British action and inaction made things worse) compounded the economic and asylum migration flow. The spread of Islamic fundamentalist terrorism into Europe added fresh fears to the mix. The eurozone was easily portrayed as a basket case in which failed EU policies were stirring up the very extremism the union had been devised to prevent. Yet the cross-party remain camp’s lacklustre campaign clung to the economic case for membership, revealing an arrogant metropolitan disdain for voters’ fears on immigration in less prosperous regions.

Cameron thought he could keep the wavering Boris Johnson onside. Instead the London mayor became leave’s biggest campaign draw, willing to deploy some of its most unscrupulous claims about migration (“Turkey is joining the EU”) and budget savings (“£350m a week for the NHS”). Cameron had also banked on strong Labour backing. But the official opposition had elected Jeremy Corbyn, a lifelong anti-European, as its leader. He declared for Europe, but millions barely noticed his feeble contribution. Nor did they believe remain’s warnings of the dangers of a leave vote, some too crude to impress anyone, some from foreign VIPs like Barack Obama. In the brave new world of Brexit, Michael Gove spoke for the 52% to 48% majority on 23 June when he said: “I think people in this country have had enough of experts.”



It wasn’t quite the outcome Macmillan had in mind when he denounced imperial illusions and sought refuge in Europe. As for EU leaders, as at Messina in 1955, they are back in conference on another Italian island determined to press ahead without the Brits.