Europe’s guilty men
Sir: What exactly do Peter Oborne and Frances Weaver (‘The great euro swindle’, 24 September) think the pro-euro camp must be called to account for? Apparently for being on the losing side in a debate which they never showed much sign of winning anyway, not least because the Chancellor of the Exchequer set conditions for entry which he knew would not be met. The Financial Times and the BBC may well have lacked even-handedness in their presentation, but their influence was balanced by the solid euroscepticism of many newspapers.
In truth, many Eurosceptics were their cause’s worst enemies. Nicholas Ridley’s comparison of Helmut Kohl to Adolf Hitler was unusual only in that it was made by a serving minister. There was never any difficulty in finding Eurosceptic journalists and Conservative backbenchers willing to denounce not merely the euro but the entire European project in terms which sometimes teetered on the edge of irrationality.
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