On the eve of St. George's Day 1993, the then Prime Minister, John Major*), had a tricky speech to deliver. He needed to convince his party they could trust him to defend the country when negotiating with the European Union. Party discipline was already badly fraying, as an increasingly voluble right-wing group refused to accept his assurances. The issue of Britain's relations with the rest of Europe split the party from the top of the cabinet to the humblest constituency association, with opinion getting increasingly 'anti-Europe' the further you got towards the party's grassroots. Within four years, the parliamentary party would be in more or less open warfare on the subject, squabbling among themselves as the Conservative government spiralled out of the sky to electoral oblivion in May 1997.

Major could sense all this. His own attitude to Europe suffered by comparison with his right-wing critics, with their easy and scary slogans, because it was essentially pragmatic, with little clear ideology. His beliefs, in the sovereignty of nation states and the importance of free trade, were no different from those of most of his party. But he was not prepared to demonize the rest of the European Union, most of whose leaders he knew and respected. What was he to do? This most English of men was a decent chap who ought to have had an instinctive understanding of the worries of 'his' people. But he had been trapped in the narrow world of Westminster politics for years. And he had few rhetorical skills; a reporter who had seen him mount his soapbox during the 1992 election campaign had described him as sounding, when he tried to declaim, like some 'angry nerd in Woolworth's returning a faulty toaster'.