It would be unthinkable to let Frans Timmermans’ wonderful love letter pass unacknowledged (European leader’s love letter says Britain would always be welcome back, 26 December). Let me, in the absence of any more eminent response, offer the first bouquet.

I have no doubt whatever that both Europhilia and Anglophilia will play a great part in our future relationship. It could not be otherwise. But we have to recognise that these two enduring and essentially organic concepts are not necessarily coterminous with full UK membership of essentially legal and administrative institutions promoting European integration.

Such is my antiquity, during the childhood of the executive vice-president of the European commission, prior to his attendance at St George’s school in Rome, I was successively the deputy head of the UK mission in Geneva, dealing inter alia with the European Free Trade Association, while we were being kept out of the EEC by the first De Gaulle veto; and political counsellor at the British embassy in Paris, concerned with renewing our application to join, in the wake of De Gaulle’s unlamented departure. The path was stony at times.

At a meeting of diplomats from east and west in Lausanne in 1957, which he addressed, Clement Attlee, the great postwar Labour prime minister, was asked if Britain was part of Europe or not. “We’re semi-detached”, he replied succinctly, and did not elaborate. Was he right? Was De Gaulle right?

A very happy new year to the most distinguished alumnus of St George’s, Rome, and to all your readers.

Peter Marshall

London

• As we enter the new year, it will be 47 calendar years since the UK officially joined the common market as it then was, preparing as we are to leave the European Union at the end of January 2020.

Whatever is the majority view in the UK on our membership of the EU (and we will now not ever know that, after a general election that conflated the matter of EU membership with party manifesto promises for our future), it has brought peace across its member nations for the first time in many centuries and the opportunity for the first time since the Roman empire for people to see themselves as much citizens of Europe as citizens of their nation states.

After January 1973 when the UK joined, the benefits of European partnership were not ever fully marketed to the people of the UK, while one penalty shot after another in terms of criticism, mistruths and derision of the EU was fired into an open goal. So perhaps it was not so surprising that when we were all asked to choose in the June 2016 referendum, many people did not see any benefits of continued EU membership and put the ills of our country firmly at the door of the EU, while at the same time being promised so much about a projected future of an unfettered UK riding the buccaneering waves of international commerce.

The UK will now move on.

The prime minister and the Conservative party have promised us a bumper decade. Let’s hope that wasn’t a spelling mistake by the headline writers. One more M can make such a difference!

Dr Adrian Heald

Labour parliamentary candidate for Mid Norfolk in 2019

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