To thrive in a post-Trump world, British Conservatives must conquer their neurosis about Europe

He is understandably angry about interventions in the German elections by the likes of JD Vance at the Munich security summit., and he recognises that Germany needs to transform its economic performance.

Merz was first elected to the Bundestag in 1994. I got to know him through a programme of meetings to enable new CDU MPs to get to know new Conservative MPs from the 1992 intake such as myself. He was ambitious, smart, and interested in, for example, the Thatcherite reforms which were transforming Britain’s economy.

Now he will be looking to France and the UK as partners in creating both a new system of European security and robustly supporting Ukraine. That is a striking contrast with an American president who appears to back Russian lies about Ukraine, deploys tariffs as a key took of economic policy, and does not wish to fund research about the climate.

Britain should still play a constructive role as a bridge between America and Europe – but Brexit makes that harder. In his excellent column on Net Zero last week Peter Franklin referred in passing to “the Remoaner Left”.  That caricature of Remainers is worth investigating as it is key to the problems facing the Conservative Party as it navigates these extraordinary divisions between Europe and America.

The assumption that the EU is a socialist project, and so supporting it is a left-wing position, is surprisingly widespread amongst American Conservatives – one reason for their hostility to the EU. There are British Conservatives who believe it too. This matters for the future of the Party as it makes it harder to include Remainers in the party, and win the support for Remain voters.

Yet the latest polls show we are now up to 55 per cent of people who think leaving was a mistake and 30 per cent who think it was right. This is partly as younger people who have lost the most gradually replace the over 65s who voted 60/40 to leave. The Conservative Party needs to find a way to engage with and respect voters who regret Brexit.

The Conservative fear about a left-wing EU goes back to Margaret Thatcher’s warning in her Bruges Speech of 1988 that “Britain would fight attempts to introduce collectivism and corporatism at the European level”. There was a genuine and understandable fear that Jacques Delors was going to use the power of the EU to bring back the labour regulations which she had spent ten years cutting back.

But he didn’t, because Conservative won that argument in Europe (as often we did). All the major increases in labour market regulation since have come from domestic politics – notably the minimum wage which Conservatives significantly boosted.

Another reason for the misconception was all the regulation to enable Thatcher’s Single Market to work. It seemed absurd that there was a European regulation on lawnmower noise. But the alternative was lots of different national standards and no capacity to create a single market rewarding the most efficient producers. There probably was too much regulation and not enough mutual recognition of different standards, but it was to create an open free market.

I do not think leaving the largest market in the world, designed with rules backed by Mrs T is “right wing” any more than wishing to stay in that market was “left wing”. If the Party can accept that then it might be able to start rebuilding the Conservative Coalition which included business people, salaried professionals, and people who felt culturally close to our European neighbours.

We may well now find ourselves working more closely on defence collaboration with European partners. That will include the Central European countries who proudly entered the EU – encouraged by successive Tory prime ministers – and were so sorry to see us leave. We will need to work with them on the most sensitive issued of national security.

That will mean carrying forward NATO’s work of standardising the means of transporting tanks by rail or the exact design of artillery shells; it will over time seem more and more odd that we can’t accept that we should also work together in a single market.

If we look around the world, close partnership with Merz and Emmanuel Macron looks like common sense. We should not regard them as ancient enemies plotting to end the nation state or impose socialism. If we are to defend and strengthen Western civilisation a good place to start is working with our European neighbours.