This article is taken from the October 2025 issue of The Critic. To get the full magazine why not subscribe? Get five issues for just £25.
“What was it like in the referendum?” The question came from a lower sixth form student — Key Stage 5 in new money — when I visited a school earlier this year. The pupils studying A-level politics weren’t even ten when the EU referendum took place in June 2016.
The 2008 global financial crisis, which did so much to exacerbate the “us and them” mentality in the UK, was ripping through the economy as they celebrated their first birthdays. The biggest single enlargement of the EU, taking in many East European countries, happened in 2004, when they were still a twinkle in their parents’ eyes. And Black Wednesday — when the UK exited the Exchange Rate Mechanism, and the “European issue” defenestrated its second Conservative prime minister — took place on 16 September 1992, when their parents were probably still in primary school.
It is striking how quickly events still so fresh in one’s own mind slip from being topics of general discussion to becoming subjects for political geeks, to — finally — existing in suspended animation as abstract themes discussed by historians. Just as Britain was a member of the League of Nations from 1920 to 1946, the period in our history from 1973 to 2020, when we were members of an international organisation which came to be known as the European Union, will also, at some point, be reduced to a historical period people vaguely recall learning about in a tedious history class at school.
For British history, measured in millennia, 47 years is not a long period of time. But Tom McTague has done historians a great service by examining this “new layer of sediment … added to the nation’s history” with a proper perspective, in a dispassionate but insightful way, before it is forgotten.
Between The Waves: The Hidden History of a Very British Revolution 1945–2016 is a worthy successor to This Blessed Plot: Britain and Europe from Churchill to Blair (1998), written by a former titan of the Lobby, the late Hugo Young — an influence acknowledged by McTague.
The book’s first half covers similar terrain — the creation of the European Coal and Steel Community; the UK’s initial wariness of joining the nascent European Economic Community; the applications for membership vetoed by General de Gaulle in 1963 and 1967; the eventual accession under Edward Heath in 1973, followed by a confirmatory referendum in 1975; the UK’s role in shaping the 1986 Single European Act; Nigel Lawson’s shadowing of the Deutschmark; the ejection of our greatest post-war prime minister thanks, in part, to the European issue; and the passage of the Maastricht Treaty, which laid bare the Conservative Party’s deep divisions over the EU.
McTague takes this story on another two decades — the continued European integration under Tony Blair; the debate over Britain’s membership of the Euro; the unanticipated escalation in immigration following the EU’s eastward expansion; how David Cameron wrestled with dwindling British influence outside the Eurozone; his attempt to settle the “European Question” (and scotch UKIP’s fox) with his renegotiation/referendum strategy; the build up to 23 June 2016; the fatal leadership election which saw Theresa May elected, the disastrous 2017 General Election, and the tin-eared Chequers plan; and — finally — Boris’s election as Conservative leader and prime minister, the controversial prorogation of Parliament, and the triumphant 2019 General Election campaign, which facilitated the withdrawal agreement and “Got Brexit Done” (for Great Britain, if not Northern Ireland).
Recounted like this, Between the Waves sounds like a plodding timeline. That couldn’t be further from the truth. McTague brilliantly brings the story to life by weaving in the central players: this isn’t a Great Man telling of history, but a tapestry of characters, some well known to the public (such as Enoch Powell and Nigel Farage) and some virtually invisible in existing books about Brexit.
Take Rodney Leach, for example. A hugely important figure for his leadership of groups from Business for Sterling to Open Europe. McTague recounts a key weekend in 2012, where Leach and his wife, Jessica Douglas-Home, hosted a group of Conservative Eurosceptics at their seaside home in Norfolk.
The group was varied, from confirmed Brexiteers (Dan Hannan) to hopeful Reformers (Andrea Leadsom), from Cameron loyalists (George Eustice) to restless campaigners keen to prepare for an inevitable referendum (your author). All of us would end up on the Leave side in 2016, but our approaches over those four years varied.
That was the nature of the Eurosceptic movement throughout the period chronicled by McTague: civil country weekends interspersed with fiercely combative weeks in Westminster. A movement united in its patriotism and dissatisfaction with Britain’s membership of the EU, but divided in its theory of change.
Knowing the period well, I inevitably spotted some events where recollections may vary. In the AV referendum, for example, I recall the inspiration to weaponise Nick Clegg’s disastrous decision to back university tuition fee increases, having promised to scrap them, coming from the combative Dan Hodges (now an acerbic Mail on Sunday columnist), rather than Stephen Gilbert (David Cameron’s political secretary).
The Conservatives certainly turned on their coalition partners in 2015, but there was considerable nervousness about NOtoAV’s tactic at the time, and pressure not to deploy it.
The subtitle of Between The Waves suggests the book ends in 2016, but it actually canters on until Britain’s official departure from the EU on 31 January 2020. I remember that evening clearly, at least the early part. The sense of elation was tinged with apprehension about Covid hitting the Continent, as two Chinese tourists in Rome tested positive for the virus. Britain had left the EU, but global threats knew no borders.
I suspect future editions will require updates beyond this point. On the international policy front, our final relationship is not yet settled, and perhaps never will be. Whether it is the current Labour government, inching us back into regulatory alignment with the dream of rejoining the Single Market (at the very least), or a future Reform government, quiet about Brexit publicly, but privately unhappy with how the 2019 deal betrayed Northern Ireland, our precise association with our Continental friends is clearly in flux.
On the domestic political front, there is at least one more act involving the main characters in this book. As McTague clearly sets out, the story about Brexit is as much about the centre right of British politics as it is about Britain’s relationship with the EU.
Nigel Farage’s departure from the Conservative Party after Margaret Thatcher’s ejection from Downing Street is well chronicled, as is the steady rise of the UK Independence Party after the introduction of proportional representation for European Elections, culminating in the devastation of Theresa May’s Conservatives by the Brexit Party in 2019 and Farage’s return as leader of Reform UK in the 2024 General Election.
Will the centre right vote be split once again at the next election, or might the two parties come to some form of electoral arrangement ahead of the vote? And how might such a deal be sold to a body which prides itself on being the oldest and most successful political party in history?
One of British conservatism’s intellectual grandees recently (at a weekend not dissimilar to that one in Norfolk) expressed doubt that Boris Johnson would return to lead the Conservatives but suspected he would play a decisive role in pre-election manoeuvrings. “Boris Johnson can explain to the Conservative Party how Farage’s generosity in not standing against sitting Tory MPs in 2019 was crucial to the historic 80-seat majority victory, and Getting Brexit Done,” he speculated.
“And at the next General Election, he can convince them it is now our turn to repay that generosity by agreeing a deal.” Why would he do that? “To come back as foreign secretary, like his frenemy David Cameron.”
Time will tell. After the Reform UK conference in September, senior figures ruled out a deal, and there is nothing to suggest Johnson seeks a return to the fray. Perhaps these matters will come to a head in time for the paperback. But with such a heavy emphasis on the post-war history of Britain’s centre right, future readers will certainly want to know how the crucial second strand of the book plays out.
McTague has the reputation of being one of the pre-eminent longform political essayists of his generation. With this book, he has also established himself as a serious political historian. I look forward to further works and highly recommend this book for general readers and Brexit obsessives alike.
