"He developed the conceit that Europe was “moving our way.” Those who called on him heard these words often. So did the Cabinet. They were a way of arguing that, if you took the long view, the problem between, say, Portillo and a pro-Europe man like Michael Heseltine might be said not really to exist. For Britain's objectives were coming about anyway. “The climate is changing,” Hurd told me on several occasions between 1992 and 1996. The Commission, repeatedly, was said to have got the message about subsidiarity. So had Delors and Mitterrand personally. There was now a new stream of higher wisdom percolating through the Community from its source-bed in London. Ideas that had once been regarded as “heresies, eccentricities of British thought” were now beginning to prevail, a development that made it “not sensible to back off into noisy and destructive isolation.”"
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Members of the Parliament of the United KingdomDiplomats of the United KingdomUniversity of Oxford facultyGovernment ministersConservative Party (UK) politicians
Original Language: English
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Sources
Hugo Young, This Blessed Plot: Britain and Europe from Churchill to Blair (1998), p. 451
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Douglas_Hurd
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Douglas Hurd
Douglas Richard Hurd, Baron Hurd of Westwell, (born 8 March 1930), is a British Conservative politician and diplomat, who served in the governments of Margaret Thatcher and John Major between 1979 and 1995. He left the Commons at the 1997 general election and was elevated to the peerage on 13 June 1997. He retired from the House of Lords on 9 June 2016.
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