The man in question was Basil de Ferranti, a Conservative Member of the European Parliament from 1979 to 1988. A profile of him by Alistair Lexden is included in a new book, The Forgotten Tribe: British MEPs 1979-2020, edited by Dianne Hayter and David Harley, which had its launch in the House of Lords on 24 October. The text of the profile follows.
Basil de Farranti (1930-88), known affectionately as Boz, personified the Conservative Party’s determination during the early years of Mrs Thatcher’s leadership to work wholeheartedly for progress in the European Community. “We are the European Party”, she declared in 1977. The 1979 Conservative election manifesto sternly rebuked the Callaghan Government, under which “our country has been prevented from taking advantage of the opportunities which membership offers.” Britain, it continued, should “play a leading and constructive role in the Community’s efforts to tackle the many problems which it faces.”
This objective was enthusiastically supported by the 60 Conservative MEPs elected in 1979, the Party’s largest ever contingent in the European Parliament. From the first, de Ferranti occupied a prominent position among them, recognised by his appointment as a Vice-President of the Parliament immediately after his arrival in 1979. Indeed, he had seemed almost destined to make a significant contribution to European affairs from the moment that Britain joined the Community in 1973 under Ted Heath, for whom he had a high regard (the feeling was mutual).
Europe was the natural sphere for his blend of political and entrepreneurial talents, which had been fostered within a family famous for its technological brilliance, who had always given fervent support to the Conservative Party since the beginnings of Ferranti International, founded by his grandfather, Sebastian Pieto Ziani de Ferranti, in 1905. The family’s origins can be traced back to eleventh- century Florence, with twelfth-century Doges of Venice also reputed to be among their forebears. Few could claim more impressive European credentials.
A charming old Etonian with a Cambridge degree in engineering ( a rare combination), Basil de Farranti established early in his career a reputation as a man who looked constantly to the future, exemplified most conspicuously by his boundless enthusiasm for developing and marketing computers. His obituary in The Times noted that “in the 1960s he foresaw the time when the computer terminal would be as commonplace in the home as the telephone.”
His passion for innovation, pursued both in Ferranti itself and in pioneering computer firms, most notably ICL of which he became managing director in 1964, helped convince him that Britain would only reap the full benefits of the technological revolution which was gathering pace, if it was at the forefront of the European Community.
He brought to the European Parliament political experience gained at Westminster early in his career . Elected for Morecambe and Lonsdale(a seat in which Ferranti was a major employer) at a by-election in 1958 when he was 28 (making him the ‘baby of the House’), he joined the ministerial ranks in July 1962 as Parliamentary Secretary at the Ministry of Aviation, a post for which he was obviously well-fitted. But the appointment lasted less than five months. He was required to sell not only his own shares in the family business to avoid a conflict of interest ( Ferranti had extensive contracts with the Ministry), but also other shares held in trust for his children. The latter proved impossible, and he resigned in October 1962.
Distressed by this experience, he left the Commons at the 1964 general election. Europe now became the focus of his political energies, which were directed in the consensual, non-partisan manner he had developed as an MP and which would later serve him well as an MEP. Like many others, he worried about the state of the Community which Britain joined in 1973. Progress had stalled; there was much talk of ‘Eurosclerosis’.
De Ferranti made his first efforts to try to help overcome the deep-seated malaise before the first European Parliament elections, as President of the Economic and Social Committee of the Community between 1976 and 1978. He encouraged this slightly cumbersome, unelected body with 144 members representing employers and trade unions, to take greater advantage of the powers it possessed to press for change. In December 1976, the Committee declared emphatically that it was “convinced that a common European currency is necessary for a lasting economic stability to be achieved.”
Greater monetary integration was one of the key objectives of the European Parliament’s Committee on Economic and Monetary Affairs and Industrial Policy, of which de Ferranti became Vice-Chair in 1979 following his election as MEP for Hampshire West( after 1984 he represented Hampshire Central until his death in 1988). The Committee was no less concerned to get the Community to fulfil another of its great original aims by completing the internal market. It was with this campaign that de Ferranti was to become most closely identified, working initially with other Conservative colleagues on the Committee ,Neil Balfour and Ben Patterson in particular.
The trio possessed a clear vision of a frontier-free Community, and pressed vigorously for its realisation. A long-serving official of the Parliament, Francis Brendan Jacobs, later recalled that “they were among the most influential members in campaigning for a much more systematic and less ad hoc approach to completing the internal market, arguing that far too little progress had been achieved over the previous 25 years.” Pragmatism was their watchword. Jacobs stressed that “they were very cautious about unnecessary harmonisation and, where appropriate, pushed for alternative approaches such as mutual recognition of national standards.” The Committee was at this time under the overall chairmanship of Jacques Delors, who won the admiration of many Conservative MEPs as they worked with him to revivify the Community in its economic aspects.
Basil de Ferranti was indefatigable in calling for the end to all internal barriers. With Parliamentary colleagues, he toured the capitals of the Community’s nations in 1979-80 to make the case directly to ministers, running into difficulty only in Italy where an indignant senior civil servant overruled his minister after the latter had happily complied with the visitors’ suggestions. De Ferranti kept up the momentum for reform through a permanent Community-wide campaigning organisation, which he set up in 1981 in partnership with two colleagues from other Parties, the Social Democrat Dieter Rogalla and Christian Democrat Karl von Wogau, both from West Germany.
They decided to call their new all-Party outfit the Kangaroo Group, a name chosen to underline its commitment to leaping over national boundaries and to persuading all Community members to do so too. It described itself as ‘ the movement for free movement’. In his authoritative Penguin Companion to European Union (1995), Dr Timothy Bainbridge, a highly regarded Conservative Party expert, referred to it as “one of the most successful single-issue groups ever established at Community level… It played a very important part in providing the rationale and political impetus for the 1985 Single Market programme.” That programme signalled clearly that the Community had finally put the malaise of the 1970s firmly behind it.
Much of the credit for the Kangaroo Group’s success lay with its principal founder. De Ferranti raised funds from sympathetic businesses to help finance its extensive range of activities throughout the Community. He advertised its work proudly, even bringing a toy kangaroo with him to his adoption meeting in Hampshire before the 1984 Euro- elections. A few months later, as the programme for reform began to take final shape, he rejoiced at the prospect of a Community with “the single market that companies throughout Europe require if they are to compete with the Japanese and Americans in the marketplace.”
At the same time, he was apprehensive about the future of his Party in the Community. While he forged his own links with members of other Parties, the Conservative group in the European Parliament worked only with the four Conservatives from Denmark. In a memorandum of 1 August 1984, he expressed deep concern about the bad relations existing between them and all the other centre/right groups which had come together as the European People’s Party( EPP). “The stage has been reached now”, he wrote, “where they are so suspicious of the British Conservatives that they might not allow us to join in their discussions, even if we wanted to.” The acrimony seriously reduced the Conservative Party’s influence in the Community.
“Is there a danger”, he asked presciently, “that Community countries on the other side of the Channel will always be ‘them’ to us?” If that was to be avoided, “ British Conservatives really must spend more time with the European People’s Party and the European People’s Party really must understand that our interests are common.”
A copy of this important memorandum was given to Mrs Thatcher by Charles Powell. She initialled it, signifying that she had read it but had no comment to make. De Ferranti’s warnings went unheeded. Four years later on 20 September 1988, she delivered her famous Bruges speech with a very different vision of Europe’s future to his. Basil de Ferranti died four days later of cancer, at the early age of 58. He would not have enjoyed the post-Bruges era. He should be remembered always as one of the great progenitors of the European Single Market.
SOURCES. Timothy Bainbridge with Anthony Teasdale, Penguin Companion to European Union (1995). Rodney Brazier, Ministers of the Crown (1997). Alan Clark, Diaries: In Power 1983-1992 (1993). Conservative Party Archive at the Bodleian Library, Oxford. Iain Dale (ed.), Conservative Party General Election Manifestos, 1900-1997 (2000). Francis Brendan Jacobs, “Contribution of British MEPs in the European Parliament: One EP Official’s Perspective” in The European Parliament: Record and Review (September 2016).The Times, 26 September 1988. The Times Guide to The House of Commons 1959. Thatcher Papers at Churchill College, Cambridge (ref. PREM 19-1231). Christopher Tugendhat,The Worm in the Apple: A History of the Conservative Party and Europe from Churchill to Cameron (2022). Laurent Warlouzet, Completing the Single Market: The European Parliament and Economic Integration, 1979-89 (2020).
