Twelve years ago selected members of John Major’s cabinet gathered at Admiralty House to hear the results of the French referendum on the Maastricht treaty. Eurosceptics like me longed for a “non”, and the enthusiasts like Douglas Hurd counted on a “oui”. Major just yearned to be delivered from the nightmare of having to get the Maastricht legislation through his party and parliament. Opinion polls said the result was too close to call.

Within minutes of the ballot boxes being sealed Major received a call from Paris to tell him that the vote had been carried by 51% to 49%. That surprised me. In my experience of elections it had never been possible to know the outcome of such a close contest so quickly. To this day I harbour shameful doubts about how the French government could be so sure so soon. British ministers exchanged sceptical glances in private as Major went outside to tell the media of his pleasure at the result.

The French yes vote was a decisive event in Major’s destruction. After that he was condemned to force through the Maastricht ratification bill. It tore the Conservative party to pieces. Today a British prime minister’s fate is once more in the hands of the French electorate. If it votes yes to the European constitution in May, Tony Blair’s premiership may be doomed. He would be obliged to hold a referendum and if that were lost he would be unlikely to survive.

Logic would dictate that he would do everything possible to help the French people to deliver a negative result. It ought also to be a great pleasure for Blair to dish his implacable political enemy, Jacques Chirac, who has staked so much on carrying this French- designed constitution.

On every issue the two leaders are in opposite camps. The French president tries to exclude Britain from any guiding role in Europe. Along with Gerhard Schröder, the German chancellor, Chirac stoutly resists Blair’s attempts to liberalise the European Union economy. Above all, Downing Street and the Elysée have been at daggers drawn on Iraq.

The term Stockholm syndrome describes a condition in which hostages come to sympathise with their abductors against their liberators. Opinion polls indicate that in France the noes are ahead, which offers Blair a chance to escape having to hold a referendum in Britain. But our prime minister has thrown his weight behind Chirac as he tries to save the yes campaign.

No British interest is served by the new constitution. As Jack Straw said candidly before the EU countries reached agreement on it, “life would go on” even if the new treaty could not be brought into force. I can understand why, perhaps, Blair would not want the British people to vote no if every other member state had ratified. What motive he has for helping yes campaigns in other countries beats me.

One answer may be that Blair, like former prime ministers, has been bamboozled by the Foreign Office, which relentlessly pushes Britain towards ever closer European union. As we awaited that French vote, a number of that cabinet reflected that we had missed our opportunity to lose our chains a few months earlier when Denmark had voted no. That was the moment to pronounce the treaty dead. But the Foreign Office had prepared for a negative result and convinced Major to declare business as usual. The Danes were made to vote again.

It was to have tragic consequences. Major, like Blair today, had found the handcuffs unlocked, the guards asleep and the door to freedom open — and like Blair he chose to remain hostage to a European treaty.

An argument that European integrationists love to use with British audiences is that the EU is going our way. They cite the Lisbon process, a list of measures to liberalise commerce between member states to boost employment and economic growth. But little progress has been made since the programme was agreed five years ago.

Last week Chirac was allowed to use the European summit to grandstand against the services directive. It ought to create 600,000 jobs by allowing consumers to buy professional work from the cheapest providers, who may be based in eastern Europe. The French president called such liberal market principles “the new communism of our age”. With the French referendum looming, Blair acquiesced with the French demand to water down the proposals.

Chirac’s position is neither new nor atypical. When I was employment secretary my German opposite number (in Helmut Kohl’s centre-right administration) declared proudly that he was not a capitalist.

Thanks to years of stolid Franco-German resistance to liberalisation, today Schröder presides over massive unemployment and the EU bumbles along with a growth rate less than half America’s. In his anxiety to give Chirac a quiet life Blair chose last week to capitulate to old Europe on a fundamental matter. It was a timely demonstration that the EU is not moving in Britain’s direction at all.