History’s cycles allow managers, and leaders, to have their hour. The Britain of the Twenties and early Thirties, recovering from the trauma of the First World War and adjusting to the emergence of organised labour as a political force after the Russian Revolution, required a manager.

It found one in the classic conservative compromiser Stanley Baldwin, who provided the balm the nation needed after the turbulence provoked by Lloyd George’s premiership. But Lloyd George himself was the man of the hour in 1916, when Britain had to transform itself from an Edwardian country ill-equipped for global war into a modern, mass-mobilised, more commercial, meritocratic and assertive nation.

Most of us can recognise how the dynamic between leader and manager has oscillated in politics across time, whether from Reagan to George Bush Sr, or, in the other direction, from John Smith to Tony Blair. But there is one area of British politics where the dynamic has all been one way — our relations with the European Union.

Throughout Britain’s membership of the EU, the managerial ethos has been firmly in the ascendant. With the exception of a few starry-eyed idealists, most notably the man who took us into the project, Sir Edward Heath, those charged with shaping Britain’s European policy have been intent on managing a relationship rather than defining a strategy. Britain’s decision to join was conceived among the Establishment figures who handled the process as an integral part of managing our post-imperial decline.

I remember Lord (Tristan) Garel-Jones explaining to me the crucial impact the Suez crisis had on his generation and the consequent belief that we could prosper only by relinquishing dreams of independent action. During the 1970s many other Conservatives were convinced that it was only by huddling under the European umbrella that we could safeguard capitalism from further lurches left in the future under a Labour Party of Foots, Benns and Castles.

The nature of those charged with handling Britain’s relationship with Europe has ensured that the whole process has stayed managerialist. The lead department traditionally responsible for EU affairs has been the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, which has a worldview which has been decidedly managerial for generations. It accepts the world as it is, and seeks what temporary advantage it can accrue, keeping the ship afloat rather than questioning where we should be going. There is a profound temperamental aversion to challenging any status quo, whether it was communist rule in Eastern Europe or tyranny in the Middle East.

The FCO Establishment took a dim view of Malcolm Rifkind’s decision as a junior minister to lay flowers on the grave of the murdered dissident priest Jerzy Popieluszko, because it unsettled relations with the Soviet bloc. The same Establishment was cool towards the democratisation of Hong Kong because that upset relations with communist Beijing and it remains dismissive of contemporary American efforts to re-make the Middle East. This attachment to managing relationships with whoever happens to squat on the throne at any given point, rather than recasting our policy on the basis of principle, has been one of the few bottom lines the FCO has been willing to defend.

This tendency has only been reinforced by those ministers who have guided Britain’s foreign policy since the war. Those foreign secretaries, in particular, who have handled our relations with the EU have been classic political managers, brokers of deals rather than breakers of new ground, from Carrington to Hurd and now Straw.

They have operated within a world where certain truths were held to be self-evident. The European Union was always assumed to be progressing down an integrationist path, and Britain’s future inevitably lay in making an accommodation with that process. The strength of British attachment to our traditional freedoms and institutions meant that, from time to time, we, the people, had to be assured that some high watermark or line in the sand had been reached.

But once tempers had calmed, and crises had been averted, Britain’s participation could be renewed and arguments about the folly of allowing ourselves to be marginalised could be resurrected. Attempts could even then be tried to argue that we should actually try to be “at the heart of Europe”, or never allow ourselves to be “isolated” again. But these counter-attacks on popular scepticism towards integration always tended to run out of momentum as the need to manage, rather than provoke, public opinion reasserted itself.

But the events of the past month have overturned all the assumptions on which relations have been managed hitherto. Our continued prosperity outside the euro, and the devastating rejection of the European constitution by two of the EU’s founder states, overturns the myth of “inevitability” completely. There is nothing inevitable about European integration any more than it was inevitable that there would always be a Habsburg on the throne of Austria-Hungary, Russian tanks on the Vistula, or, indeed, a House of Saud in Riyadh.

The argument of the managers has always been that we failed to maximise our influence in Europe by dragging our feet on integration, but that argument now has all the potency of maintaining that we lack influence in Poland because we were insufficiently accommodating to the Warsaw Pact.

All the diplomatic energy expended in managing an inherently flawed project should have been used giving a lead to those, now clearly a majority of Europe’s people, who clearly want an alternative. That is the real missed opportunity of the past 20 years. And that is the challenge for the next generation of Britain’s leaders.

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