Just like Lance Armstrong, Mandelson and Clarke should apologise for past errors if they want traction with the public in future
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Britain is edging towards its European showdown. Photograph: Yves Logghe/AP
As Britain edges towards its European showdown it's worth asking what Ken Clarke and Peter Mandelson have in common with Lance Armstrong, the disgraced ex-winner of multiple Tours de France. No, not a systemic and fraudulent use of performance enhancing drugs to the detriment of a much-loved sport. Clarke and Lord M have no need of stimulants to get them excited over Europe or fiscal policy.
The problem the Westminster pair share with Armstrong is the one he is preparing to tackle when he appears on Oprah Winfrey's "no holds barred" TV sofa this week: how to atone for error and thereby regain the respect and – for politicians, more important – the attention of disillusioned voters. Failure to get it right will end arrogant Armstrong's career. Clarke and Mandelson's latest Centre for British Influence through Europe (CBIE) campaign could fail for the same reason, as will Ed Balls's recurring attacks on the coalition's deflationary economic response to the recession.
It's all getting urgent. David Cameron was on the airwaves this morning – ahead of next week's big Cameron speech in The Hague on EU policy – trying to steer a course between renegotiation and repatriation of some powers from Brussels and a stampede for the fire exit, which is what many Tories, MPs, ministers and voters would prefer.
Ed Miliband says the PM risks "sleepwalking out of Europe". He's right. And it's not something I say every day.
Even Eric Pickles is cheeking Dave now, echoing George Osborne in saying that we've got to be prepared to quit Europe if we are to obtain the revised terms we need. It's a risky strategy, a bluff which both Brussels and Ukip could easily call. Harold Wilson was allowed a pretty phoney "renegotiation" in 1975 – he later won the in/out referendum by 2 to 1 – but patience is wearing thin nowadays.
The "renegotiate or bust" lobby is wrong (says me), as guilty of panacea politics as Alex Salmond is in Scotland. "Let's cast off the chains of foreign domination and enjoy our freedom to do what suits us," they cry. It's a fantasy (ask the Irish), albeit a potent one. But the sceptics and the phobics do have a point when they say to the Clarke/Mando crowd: "You got it wrong before and you have never said sorry." Well, have they? If one of them made a big "Sorry" speech I missed it.
Clever Robert McCrum wrote a subtle Observer article on Sunday about redemption after a public fall from grace which Clarke and Mandelson could usefully read. Richard Nixon, Tiger Woods, John Profumo, Bill Clinton and the rest, they all managed in different ways to atone for their very public failings, he wrote. Gerard Depardieu, the thespian Russian tax exile, may soon have to embark on the same stony path of contrition and hard work now he's realised he has made a fool of himself.
On a week when all the big guns are firing over Cameron's promised renegotiation with Brussels the contrition bit matters for people such as Ken Clarke – there are plenty like him, including fellow campaigners such as Tony Blair and Michael Heseltine – because their impassioned pleas for Britain to remain at the heart of Europe overlook one important fact: all the dire warnings they now issue about the dangers to British jobs and interests in leaving the EU are near-identical to the warnings they gave about Britain NOT joining the new single currency in 2001.
It's a bit like Ed Balls and economic policy. Every time the shadow chancellor urges a more expansionary fiscal policy – more public spending, more debt, even some tax cuts – to float HMS Britain off the recessionary rocks, he reminds any voter with half a brain that he and Captain Brown were at the helm when lax fiscal and regulatory policies helped the rackety bankers steer us on to those self-same rocks. Likewise Heseltine, Blair, Mandelson, Clarke and Co over their misplaced enthusiasm for the euro, from which, incidentally, Brown and Balls saved us; though they get little credit for it.
Sooner or later there was bound to be trouble with the currency. You can't have a currency without some form of state in place to manage it, a measure of banking union and fiscal oversight. That's what's happening now, as Germany makes perfectly reasonable demands for control over its neighbours' budgets, which German taxpayers may have to underwrite.
The new German model may, or may not, work. Some EU officials are already saying the euro crisis of 2008 is now past its worst. Well, maybe, though even a multilingual europhile such as Nick Clegg said within my hearing last week that such talk is a bit premature. He also said that Britain will not be joining the euro in his political lifetime. Correct on both counts.
But it's not our fight. Ever since Britain finally joined Europe 40 years ago this month, Brussels, Berlin and Paris have had to make adjustments to accommodate us, that Wilson referendum, Margaret Thatcher's rebate, John Major's assorted opt-outs at Maastricht, taken up by Blair and Brown when they didn't join the euro but did join the social chapter to show goodwill.
Now Cameron and Co want to opt back out again of assorted policies – crime and justice for example – while reserving the right to opt into the bits they like, a reciprocal European arrest warrant being one. The warrant is unpopular for all sorts of reasons, good and bad, but we do need it. You can see why the foreigners, busy with their own problems (which include rising resentment and nationalism at home) get cross. Why can't the Brits make up their minds and stick to it?
Even the Obama administration, usually not much bothered with tired old Europe, is telling us to stay put, although that Bush team idiot John Bolton has popped up in the Times on Monday to encourage the hotheads. It's a replay of Donald Rumsfeld's "Old Europe" vs "New Europe" jibe; except it doesn't play so well in New Europe nowadays.
Cameron may (may) be able to negotiate a credible new deal with Paris and Berlin – he's already got useful leverage over banking reforms and the Fresh Start group of not-daft Tory MPs believes he could do better. Other countries want to change things, too. But the big players may feel they have better things to do with their time than pander (again) to a grandstanding, self-centred strategy, driven by fear of Ukip's appeal to fed-up voters. It is fraught with peril, with potential benefits clearly outweighed by the risks.
As for Fleet St's anti-EU cheerleaders, the folk who gave you phone hacking and much else unsavoury besides, they are poor judges of the national interest, too. The people who own these papers don't pay income tax here and (mostly) don't have correspondents in Brussels either.
They have plenty of good reasons to gripe about over-ambitious, under-performing EU policy, quite apart from the eurozone crisis, which damages us all. But much of the problem we perceive is of our own making (for instance, the way we apply EU regulations domestically) or mere scapegoating for our own failings, economic, social and political.
Monday's Guardian letters include a number of useful reminders – disputed in other letters – of the benefit of EU membership. Ukip's remedies are pretty flaky, just as Alex Salmond's unanswerable case for independence doesn't stand up to a robust kicking. The tone of aggrieved, panacea populism sounds much the same in London, Edinburgh or in small town America with its Tea Party enthusiasm for more guns and less tax.
Life will go on if Scotland votes for independence in 2014 and Britain votes to leave the EU in 2015-16, though the thought of Scotland reapplying for membership after England and Wales leave (and Belfast embraces Dublin?) is certainly not dull. Life will alway go on until the sun dies and even the FT's pro-EU German columnist, Wolfgang Munchau, admits in Monday's column that UK membership is "virtually irrelevant" in macroeconomic terms since we left "the heart of Europe" by sidestepping the euro 20 years ago, a view not widely shared by his paper.
As a "Son of Thatcher" Eurosceptic, Cameron does not carry the baggage of the older Heathite generation of Clarke and Hezza. If he is to try a renegotiation he needs to show real leadership and courage in keeping his own party in line and Ukip holed up in its natural habitat, the saloon bar.
But the allies that Cameron will need on the pro-EU wing must first own up to their past mistakes and errors of judgment. We look to Lance Armstrong to show them the benefits of confessional contrition with Oprah.