Roy Denman
Author of Missed Chances: Britain and Europe in the Twentieth Century
About the Author
Sir Roy Denman was educated at St John's College, Cambridge. Among his public service appointments, he was Deputy Secretary at the Department of Trade and Industry and a member of the team which negotiated Britain's entry into the European Communities, and Second Permanent Secretary and Head of the show more European Secretariat at the Cabinet Office. He served as Director General for External Relations at the European Commission from 1977 until 1982, when he went to Washington as Ambassador of the European Communities, a position he held until his retirement in 1989 show less
Works by Roy Denman
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Common Knowledge
- Gender
- male
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- Works
- 2
- Members
- 15
- Popularity
- #708,120
- Rating
- 2.5
- Reviews
- 1
- ISBNs
- 3
Denman's over-arching theory does not go a lot further than "Britain got it wrong", which may be the sort of wake-up call that some need to hear from retired senior mandarins, but if (like me) you more or less take it as a political axiom it's not really news. A quarter of the book is dedicated to arguing the peculiar and questionable proposition that Britain should have stayed out of the second world war (because the Soviet Union would have beaten the Germans anyway). There are, however, some really good chapters near the end, when he gets to his own first-person observations of how British negotiations to join were handled in the 1960s and 1970s, and how rapidly the UK started to screw up its own effectiveness in EU institutions after the departure of the Europhile Heath as Prime Minister. The book was published in 1997, and is essentially a call to the incoming Labour government to play the EU game as it is meant to be played. I think that, ten years on, Denman would probably have given Blair a pass mark, but not a very high one; he would certainly have failed Wilson, Callaghan, Thatcher and Heath.… (more)