Jacques Delors: an unlikely Brexit hero

‘Up yours, Delors!’

It was the perfect headline for the Sun: crude, defiant, unambiguous and directed at a Frenchman. The paper’s front page on 1 November 1990 called on ‘its patriotic family of readers to tell the filthy French to FROG OFF!’

The tabloid was asking its readers to turn towards France at noon the following day and shout the insult in response to the proposal by the President of the European Commission, Jacques Delors, to introduce European monetary union, setting economic convergence criteria with the objective of a single currency and a single central bank. The revulsion at the ECU, or European Currency Unit, was, however, a proxy for the broader movement in favour of closer European integration and supranational institutions, and beyond that, for every negative instinct towards the continent that Britons had ever entertained.

I grew up as British Euroscepticism was maturing and becoming a potent force in the Conservative party. There had always been a strand of opinion on the right which opposed membership of the European Economic Community, originally resting on lingering memories of the empire and loyalty to the Commonwealth.