I RECENTLY INDULGED IN SOME TIME TRAVEL. Nothing too grandiose or far away. Just a brief excursion into the near past. My anachronistic excursion was a short book: Stephen Green’s The European Identity. Green’s book was published in October 2015. David Cameron had finally won a general election, and Britain was moving inexorably towards that roll-of-the-dice referendum. The European Identity is an articulate and confident case for Britain within Europe. A little more Green and a little less Cameron might have stabilised some teetering voters. But despite the book’s merits and Green’s undeniable perspicacity, the slim volume is an antediluvian read.
There is an air of unreality to reading a text from before the referendum. Its call to strengthen Britain’s place in Europe reads like future-historical fiction. It has a dreamlike resemblance to The Riddle of the Sands, Erskine Childers’s 1903 masterpiece novel of yachting and espionage, which both correctly predicted the threat of bellicose Wilhelmine militarism and charmingly suggested that a catastrophic war with Germany might be avoided by a well-resourced and vigilant Royal Navy.
Green belongs to what seemed a more solid world than the one we currently inhabit. He is the quintessence of the modern British establishment: a former group chief executive of HSBC raised to the peerage as Baron Green of Hurstpierpoint, a Trade minister in the Cameron-Clegg coalition and a Church of
