The European Carrot: Daniel Hannan in Oxford

There is a man in an Oxford lecture hall waving his arms about. He is dressed in a perfectly cut blue suit, viyella shirt, and shoes as shiny as a new Brexit fifty pence piece. The man is Daniel Hannan, and he is addressing a student audience of wannabe politicians, economists, journalists, and Policy Exchange hacks. Having studied at Oriel College in the early ‘90s, and been elected as the President of the Oxford University Conservative Association, the group he is now addressing, he is here as much as an alumnus as a politician, and he knows it.

Hannan intersperses his hour-long talk at Lady Margaret Hall with tales of his time politicking in Oxford, and his early sentiments against Britain becoming further involved with the EU. He comments on the state of Euroscepticism on campus during his time as an undergraduate - it was ‘radical, anti-establishment, and moderately cool’, in an ironic enough parallel to the state of anti-EU feeling among Oxford students at the present time. He reminisces about a meeting in the Queen’s Lane Coffee House in December 1990, where he founded the Oxford Campaign for an Independent Britain with a group of similarly-minded students. In a Cherwell interview in 2017, Hannan commented that being anti-EU ‘went with being against big corporations and big government, and the establishment. It was for the people, against the elites.’ This line hasn’t changed; it’s easy to see the Conservative philosophy which made him an ally of the Maastricht Rebels, and lead to the European Research Group being set up just as Hannan graduated, allowing him to take on the role of the group’s Secretary straight from College.

Conservative philosophy seems a topic of keen interest for Hannan. He talks about Stanley Baldwin and Henry Maine and Roger Scruton; the former he dubs ‘only notionally a Conservative’ and ‘lacking in ideology’, though goes on to question whether, in fact, that lack of ideology is the actual essence of Conservatism. This wryness continues when he recalls Maine (the Whig historian and legal theorist) and his belief that ‘all human history should be understood as a move from status to contract [that is, from the constraints of birth and class to a capitalist free market allowing economic and social mobility]’, before adding to the end of the theorem ‘or, was it the other way round?’ 

This relationship between political philosophy and its rhetoric is one that Hannan has clearly studied, and perhaps made use of himself. He speaks as if at a rally, with wild hand gestures and a deeply convincing manner of talk. Never does he seem to believe in his own words so much as when he talks about Roger Scruton. Scruton had given a talk at Marlborough College while Hannan was a GCSE student there and apparently inspired him with various witticisms on political thinking, one being that ‘The role of a conservative thinker is to reassure the people that their prejudices are true.’ Hannan wrote for The Spectator upon Scruton’s death that ‘That beautiful aperçu never left me. It animated my career in politics’. He talks at length about another interaction with Scruton, this time at Oxford and a member of the Disraeli Club (a University dining club of sorts, now rebranded with rather less sex appeal as the Disraeli Society, Christ Church). During a Disraeli Club dinner at the Randolph where the philosopher was their guest, a self-confessedly drunken Hannan and friends decided to fire increasingly inane statements at Scruton, challenging him to explain them into stylish philosophical arguments. Hannan tells us of a chap holding a piece of carrot on the edge of his fork, commenting on the Europeans’ inability to cook veg properly and their horrid preference for al dente root vegetables; Scruton allegedly turned this into an anthropological discussion of evolutions, the customs of nations, and the reminiscences of evolutional savagery. Hannan smiles through the story. He ends the Scruton chat on the tentative suggestion that Scruton’s life as a philosopher ‘typifies the shift from intellectual to lived Conservatism’ in our age. The European carrot being criticised by the student, like the European jurisdiction being called into question by the British people and their politicians, is seen in working life as much as in the abstract. It is a symbol of the commonalities and clashes between different nations that have tied themselves together: for good in many ways, but for ill in several others.

Hannan’s fundamentally bright optimism recur throughout the talk. He mentions Stephen Pinker’s 2018 book Enlightenment Now, and why we ought to celebrate the progress Britain (and the world) has made politically, economically, and socially, often drawing up parallels between 2020 Britain and 1972 Britain. ‘There has never been a better time than now to be a human being,’ he says, echoing Pinker’s statement that ‘There can be no question of which was the greatest era for culture; the answer has to be today, until it is superseded by tomorrow.’ Hannan takes care not to fall into the Brexit rhetoric we have seen so often on television screens and Twitter threads in recent days and weeks; the way he presents it, our leaving the European Union fits in with this general trend towards societal progress, rather than, as perhaps Farage might say, engendering a new era of it.

He talks about Farage cheerfully but somewhat disparagingly, reminding us of the 6-point poll loss for Leave following UKIP’s ‘Breaking Point’ poster showing queues of migrants, and the strange way that immigration inserted itself into the 2016 Referendum. ‘In February 2019’, Hannan says, ‘May came back with no hint of sovereignty in the face of EU bureaucracy.’ This, he argues, is because she returned with a deal that had altered frontier laws between the EU and Britain as a priority, rather than solving the myriad of other issues which he believes made the British people vote to Leave. ‘People wanted to stay in the market but outside the political institutions of the EU’, he says, explaining further why the issue of sovereignty and self-determination at a constitutional level were more fundamental factors in the Referendum’s result than immigration and border control. At this point, he defends Boris Johnson’s attitude to immigrants during his tenure as Mayor of London, and points out Johnson’s wish to offer illegal immigrants living in London settled status. Later on, Hannan is asked whether Brexit would end tribalism or give way to more of it; he mentions Johnson again, and somewhat laterally Trump and the American elections. His auspicious manner drops for a moment as he says that ‘maybe the twentieth century was the exception to the rule of vicious partisanism’, recalling the American election of 1860 and the fall forward from it to the American Civil War. He quickly misquotes Robert Burns, something to do with fretting and fearing, and calls for the next question.

Someone asks him what he’ll be doing next. Writing, he says; teaching, a bit of television. ‘But the first thing I’m going to do is buy a dog.’ Hannan’s persona is a likeable one, and his onward-moving energy is undeniable. At times, it seems a useful attitude to fall back on, both for him and for the rest of us. When he began his talk, he had asked: ‘why don’t we appreciate our good fortune?’, and answered himself: ‘because it feels wrong’. Now, he quotes the smash-hit musical Hamilton (“Look around, look around / At how lucky we are to be alive right now”). He knows his audience, and, when it seems that the room might question his unwavering optimism, he lets the sentiment play out. ‘Britain is on a journey,’ he believes. ‘We have the correction mechanism in our hands. And that is why I am so cheerful.’ 

Annabelle Fuller is a second-year undergraduate reading Classics and English at Magdalen College

Photographs courtesy of Tom Foster-Brown