Christopher Booker and Richard North’s book ‘The Great Deception’ is subtitled ‘The Secret History of the European Union’. It really ought to be subtitled ‘How the Gullible British Were Duped by Those Damned Cunning Continentals’. It is basically a political thriller by two journalists with vivid imaginations who describe how the British have been outwitted in a great game, the rules of which they have never understood.I found it a good if flawed account of the Euro-sceptic British position on the EU and all things European and I recommend to colleagues in both the UK and overseas as background reading in cultural matters.

The first two thirds of the book are the most interesting and best researched. The authors have, for example, combed through hundreds of pages of dreary information and dusty documents recently released from the Public Records Office (PRO) which give a behind the scenes picture of British diplomacy and there is a lengthy bibliography.

They are able to reveal, for example, that the real reason de Gaulle opposed British entry twice into the European Common Market was not because of Britain's supposed ‘Atlanticism’ or its ‘maritime nature’ but because de Gaulle was having trouble getting the Common Agricultural Policy agreed among ‘the Six’ and feared that if the UK entered before this was settled it would have intervened in the negotiations and blocked the enormous subsidies he was wangling for French farmers. According to Booker and North, if de Gaulle had not got those subsidies it would have resulted in the same mass unrest in the fields of France as there had been in the streets of Paris in 1968. Eventually, when France had got what it wanted, Pompidou simply withdrew his objection and in came Britannia. At the time, Heath and Macmillan both knew what the French were doing, but neither believed that it was the main reason for France’s veto of Britain’s entry (p 118).

Or did they? The authors from time to time refer to various UK political autobiographies and claim that what the politicians recall in their memoirs is often not completely candid. In fact they suggest throughout that there are two seeming contradictory versions of the past, and its never quite clear which the authors think is the real story. Either Britannia was a foolishly naïve European virgin, untutored in the ways of the Continentals that ran rings round her and manipulated her mercilessly; or she was completely aware that the real intention of Schuman, Spaak, Monnet and the rest was to create a Supranational super-state and then she (or rather her political leaders) lied about it to us - and continue to lie about it.

For example Heath knew that joining the Common Market meant that Britain would have to open up her inshore fishing waters to the trawlers of the other EC states and yet concealed this during the period before the UK joined for fear that the fishing industry would stir up dissent. At the same time (and on the same page) Booker and North also claim that Heath had misunderstood Article 38 of the Treaty of Rome and assumed this formed a legal basis for the Common Fisheries Policy (p147 and footnotes). Well, which is it? Was he deceived or was he a deceiver?

Other Prime Ministers get a similar treatment. They were either a victim of ‘deception’ like Thatcher (p 432) or like Major guilty of unpardonable ‘innocence’ (p 265). And yet Thatcher was also able to give ‘an accurate diagnosis’ of ‘all that was wrong’ with the Community’s position on the GATT (p 257), and Major was disingenuous enough despite his ‘innocence’ to try and ‘position EMU [European Monetary Union] as solely an economic issue, with no constitutional implications’ (p 321) despite knowing or suspecting the opposite.

To square these two apparently contradictory explanations of the British position the end chapter of the book discusses whether there was a great deception or a great self-deception. Ultimately it’s impossible for the reader to judge. We get very little insight into the minds of the French or the Germans, and see them only from the British point of view, across the negotiating table if you will. Chirac is ‘high handed’ (p 390), Shroeder is accused of Euro-sceptical ‘grandstanding’ to ‘appease the powerful Lander’ during his election campaign (p 355). And apart from this, when the British actually look like they are getting the upper hand, de Gaulle and Adenauer or Giscard and Schmidt or Mitterand and Kohl or Chirac and Kohl or Chirac and Shroeder sneak off into a room, have a chat, do a deal and then emerge to spring a counter attack which outwits the British. As the reader has no idea of what is being discussed in these meetings or the interior motives of the ‘conspirators’, we never really get to understand the nature of the Franco-German relationship except as a ‘conspiracy against the Brits’. The bibliography has only three books in French and none in German (although there are several by European authors in English but these are overwhelming critical such as Paul van Buitenen’s book about fraud in the European Commission.)

For all that there are a couple of ‘Oh, really?’ moments, such as the fact that the failure to vaccinate the National Herd during the UK's 2001 Foot and Mouth Disease outbreak was the result of a ‘system failure’ (p 395) when the British misunderstood a European Directive issued in 1990 which seemingly forbade the use of vaccine (which it did not) and did not realise until too late (and concealed it). Also it appears that the much heralded and courageous decision of Gordon Brown to make the bank of England independent in 1997 and set its own interest rates was merely to conform to Article 109e (5) of the Maastricht Treaty (p 337): again concealed from the British public.

But there is a flaw in the book’s exhaustive investigations. Apart from the scarcity of non-English reference material, the primary sources run out when releases from the PRO run out in 1973 (under the thirty year rule) and the latter parts of the book rely on secondary sources such as the political autobiographies of Thatcher (who comes out of all this rather well, unsurprisingly), Heath, Howe, Lawson, Major etc (who don’t). And when these run out as well, the authors are forced to base their thesis to a large extent on such newspaper articles and press reports (second hand sources at best) including unimpeachable and reliable organs as The Daily Telegraph and The Daily Mail. Tony Blair, in the final pages, gets the greatest thrashing with newsprint.

The majority of their scorn is poured on the Commission itself, and especially its presidents Delors, Santer and Prodi who are accused of trying to big-up their parts by accumulating even more power from national governments, who unwittingly sign over vast amounts of national sovereignty with every treaty. This is ‘the Monnet method’ – a series of small steps in the direction of political union taken one or two at a time so as not to frighten anyone or cause a big row. Monnet himself is portrayed as an arch manipulator, using Schuman, for example (the man whose ‘Declaration’ is credited with putting forward the concept of European unity) ‘as little more than a ventiloquist’s dummy’ (p 428). The authors ridicule the early executive of the Community who went about addressing each other as Your Excellency and behaving with the exquisite protocol of a kind of Middle European Grand Duchy. Later Prodi is characterised as like some great untouchable potentate - ‘residing undisturbed in Brussels’ as Berusconi puts it (p 419).

It’s a shame that the book weakens towards the end. The authors are beside themselves with glee in the earlier pages when they reveal the ‘real reason’ or the ‘real motive’ behind the acts of various historical figures and are able to reinterpret the actions of de Gaulle and Heath. It doesn’t seem to have occurred to them that in thirty years, when the ‘Blair papers’ are released from the PRO there might be a completely different take on the behind the scenes discussions on say the Constitutional Treaty or split in the EU over Iraq. Booker and North do not really address Iraq (the book was published in 2003) – it was a decisive moment in the relationship with America and seemed to cut against all the grand plans to develop a ‘Common Foreign Policy’. They claim that Britain and all the EU States have given up national control of foreign affairs to faceless bureaucrats in Brussels, whereas, of course, Britain, Poland, Italy and Spain all went their own way while Germany and France went theirs. The demonstrations in the streets of London in February 2003 showed that the British people tended to agree more with the Franco-German position than with that of their own government.

Booker and North are not, of course, in a position to reflect on the failure of the constitutional treaty which occurred in 2005 (in France, the country which they some to hold up most frequently as the greatest deceiver of all). Nor can they know the economic and social benefits which have accrued to the 10 new member states on joining in 2004 (growth has exceed expectation). Nor do they really acknowledge that many of these new countries are sceptical of the Franco-German approach to European unity. Right at the end they raise the longstanding spectre of the ‘Two Speed’ Europe. They immediately assume that the faster group will be all those States in the Euro Zone, whereas Nicholas Sarkozy (one of the likely successors to Chirac) has already said that the Franco-German ‘motor’ of the EU is no longer adequate, and that perhaps the six largest countries of Europe should form some sort of alliance to led the EU forward (France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Britain and Poland - each with populations of about 40 million – in total three-quarters of Europe’s population.)

And finally – as Booker and North point out – the UK economy is actually doing rather better than most other European economies (at the moment) despite all this European Union domination. But they quite never square this with the drain that they claim Europe has on the UK's finances, nor do they give the Euro-enthusiastic Ken Clarke (a failed candidate for the Tory Leadership) any real credit for the rebuilding of the British economy in his role as the UK Chancellor of the Exchequer after Black Wednesday in the 1990s.

Nevertheless The Great Deception is a stimulating read – and perhaps best for its lucid analysis of the tension between the forces of ‘Supranationalism’ and ‘Intergovernmentalism’ which has really been the motor pulling and pushing the European project on its erratic course to ‘ever closer union’.