The View from Europe ‘I had no memory of my dad doing anything but politics. I felt it was something important and it made me feel proud. The more I engaged him over the dinner table, the more those precocious interrogations gave me a taste for political journalism. After a brief conviction, around 10 years old, that I would one day be Prime Minister, I came to an early realisation that I relished being a tomato thrower and not a tomato target. It was far more fun, and far less hard.’ Political journalist Tom Newton Dunn (C2 1989-91) on his father, Bill Newton Dunn (C2 1955-59).
E
very political argument has opposing poles. The furthest left, the hardest right. The libertarian absolute, the totalitarian extreme. In Britain’s eternal debate about its role in Europe, my father, Bill Newton Dunn, occupied the pro-European pole. He was the arch-federalist, the ultimate anti-nationalist, and the devout believer in the United States of Europe. The Eurosceptics, who eventually morphed into hard Brexiteers, were his mortal enemy. They eventually won (though only for now, he insists), but the war that Bill and his tribe waged against them has lasted half a century to date and defined his entire political career. Thirty-one of those years for my father were spent in the European Parliament, making him Europe’s longest serving MEP by the time it all ended. But politics for him began in Stockwell, not Brussels.
Conservatism in South London in the mid-1970s was a lonely business, because there weren’t many of them. Bill chaired North Lambeth Conservatives and the chairman of next-door Brixton Conservatives was John Major. Both were looking for seats for the 1979 general election. My father got down to the last two in Putney and was narrowly beaten to it by a silver-tongued young QC, David Mellor. Bill found a berth elsewhere. In 1979, the first direct elections to the European Parliament were held and Bill was voted in as the Tory MEP for Lincolnshire. Bill soon ‘went native’ in Brussels, as Thatcher’s Number 10 used to enjoy saying. My father and many of his generation born in the 1930s and 40s felt a deep philosophical commitment to building a Europe that would never go to war with itself again. That only deepened once he was surrounded The Marlburian Club Magazine
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