As this miserable Christmas approaches, a strange sound is heard in the corridors of power. It is the mighty, muffled tread of the ghost of Henry VIII. Called from his grave by recent developments in our relations with Europe, he — the original Eurosceptic — has come to revisit the site of his old Palace of Whitehall and offer unexpected seasonal comfort to its present denizens.

He lingers longest in Downing Street. The Prime Minister is asleep — only a few yards, as it happens, from the location of Henry’s own bedchamber. And he stirs in his slumber as he hears the royal voice intone: “This realm of England is an empire, governed by one supreme head and king, furnished with plenary power to render and yield justice to all manner of folk within this realm in all causes without restraint or provocation [appeal] to any foreign princes or potentates.”

The Prime Minister jolts awake. “Well, blow me down,” he says in his best Biggles fashion. “Here’s the new big idea. Not the Big Society but the Nation State.”
Fantasy, of course. But there are straws in the wind. Rather a lot of them actually. First there was the Prime Minister’s own wielding of the national veto at the “save the euro” EU summit. His actions there were neither principled nor well thought through.

The ghost of Henry VIII listens a little impatiently because he has heard it all before. Indeed, on this very spot. For when Sir Thomas More, Henry VIII’s former friend and Lord Irvine’s predecessor as Lord Chancellor, was on trial for his life in Westminster Hall for refusing to accept Henry’s headship of the Church, he had pleaded, like a modern Europhile judge, that English law was subordinate to European law, “the general law of Christ’s universal Catholic Church”. And he had been answered, almost in Lord Irvine’s words, that a law passed by Parliament was good enough for England…

Ever since Disraeli’s refounding of the Tory Party in the mid-19th century, the idea of the Nation has been central to the Conservatives’ appeal. Too often, no doubt, in the Victorian period it took the form of aggression and colonial conquest. But recent events have given it a new respectability. For only the nation state — as the debacle of the euro makes clear — can offer any sort of guarantee of democracy or prosperity. It is not a perfect instrument, of course, but at least it is better than the bureaucratic imperialism of European institutions.

(Dr. Benny Peiser)