Beyond Heath, British involvement with the EEC, the EC and then the EU has been presented by the Conservatives mainly in terms of a fudge, with the economic benefits of membership hyped up and the downsides either not acknowledged or only rarely dealt with. Where there were concessions to be made, it was intoned gravely that they were "in the national interest" (one of the most bogus of phrases in politics). Outside the battle for national survival in a major war, the "national interest" is usually a cover for establishment groupthink and sly deal-making, devoid of principle.

Tory ministers tended to talk about Europe either in terms of dull technical practicalities and regrettable compromises made in search of  illusory "influence" or, occasionally, as the free-trading wave of the future and economic modernisation.

Tory pragmatism explains the approach of John Major during the Maastricht negotiations in 1991-92 and of Margaret Thatcher for much of her premiership. If there were supposed benefits, and in the case of the single market there obviously were economic gains, those raising objections could be dismissed as fundamentalists who were out of touch with the modern realities of cross-border co-operation. Before the end of the Cold War there was the example of Nato to point to. Didn't it involve a pooling of sovereignty for greater defence security? Wasn't the coming European Union just the economic equivalent of Nato?

The attitude of the senior civil service was pivotal. In 1998, in This Blessed Plot, Hugo Young revealed to devastating effect how senior officials in the Foreign Office and elsewhere had run a shadow policy, propelling Britain towards much deeper immersion in the European project than ministers thought they were signed up to accept. If the politicians would not drive Britain towards its destiny then officials would do so by stealth in conjunction with their fellow bureaucrats across the water. To obscure this the overwhelmingly Europhile Whitehall mandarinate cunningly promoted the idea that Britain was a tough negotiator on individual measures. Occasional "concessions" won by ministers disguised the underlying direction of travel. Cleverly, here they appealed to the vanity of Tory ministers, who in office tend to like the idea that they are hard-headed realists or grown-ups who understand the compromises involved in wielding power.