Lord Salisbury: 'Defensive and troubled EU is out of date in a fast-changing world'

The Marquess of Salisbury is my favourite living politician, just as his great great-grandfather, the Prime Minister, is my favourite dead one. In an elegant article in a super magazine called Reaction he (the living one) argues that the EU is

an ancien regime faced with the transfer of global economic power to East of Suez and, with the exception of the United Kingdom, the relative decline of the intellectual power houses that enabled Western Europe to dominate the last three centuries.

Were the nations of the EU to rise above Theresa May’s supine performance and show enough confidence in their own future to negotiate as between equals, we could come to an agreement which would enable the UK and the EU to coexist to our mutual advantage. Instead, they are so worried about their own future that they dare not yield an inch and insist on trying to humiliate the one nation on earth that could help them out of the hole they have dug for themselves. As a result, the United Kingdom looks like having to choose between taxation and lawmaking without representation and an unnecessarily costly transition to what will in the end turn out to be a prosperous future.

May and her advisers have much to answer for, but so have the Commission and the architects of the EU. They are building a Union designed for the 1960s in a world changing faster than at any time since the 16th century.

I had lunch with him in 1983 and we talked about Romania, which he had visited and I wanted to visit, and Trollope, whom we both loved. He is the best politician alive and almost the only one whose ideas fit with mine. 

Bruce Anderson says William Hague should shed his peerage and become Prime Minister but in fact Lord Salisbury should. Or better still be Prime Minister in the upper house.