Nick Boles / Sep 2026
Image: Shutterstock
“Nothing but dreams! What is he smoking? When will the British ever learn?” When I wrote my recent paper arguing for a new deal between the UK, Ukraine and Europe and the establishment of a European Confederation as Europe’s outer ring (as first proposed by President Francois Mitterrand in 1990) I hadn’t expected an enthusiastic response from the august burghers of Brussels. But I thought the criticism might be a bit more nuanced.
I do dream of a better future for Britain and Europe and I don’t require narcotics to generate them. As one of a small number of British Conservatives who sacrificed my political career on the altar of Brexit, martyr to the belief that Britain belongs in Europe, I do not need to be taught any lessons in European solidarity by Commission officials however distinguished or continental politicians however high and mighty.
I realise that what I proposed is radical and challenges many of the settled formulae that have governed EU negotiations with would be members and partners in the last three decades. But I don’t think it’s a coincidence that a few weeks later the President of the Commission provoked a burst of frantic fluttering in European dovecotes when she proposed to the Prime Minister of Canada ‘associate membership’ in terms strikingly similar to those I used. I don’t flatter myself that Ursula von der Leyen read my paper or is aware of my ideas. But she, like Mark Carney, observes the unavoidable facts of life in 2026: everything has changed, the rules and alliances that underpinned decades of free trade and mutual defence between America, Britain and Europe are a busted flush, continuing in form but increasingly hollow. What Napoleon did to the Holy Roman Empire, Trump is doing to the Western Alliance. Soon it too will be the butt of jokes (though none is likely to match the wit of Voltaire)
As a very ex-politician, no longer in Parliament and no longer a member of a political party, what can I hope to achieve? Simply this. That the elites in Britain and Europe open their eyes to the new world we live in, and open their minds to new ideas, new ways of working together, new institutions and new alliances. The voters in every country are way ahead of them. They see that everything has changed. They know we face challenges and risks greater than anything we have seen since the end of the Cold War. And they demand that we show them how we will renew their prosperity and rebuild their security.
They want to know how Ukraine and Albania and Serbia can be brought into the European family without overwhelming Europe’s political stability with new waves of migration or bankrupting the Common Agricultural Policy.
They want to know how Britain’s military capabilities including our nuclear deterrent will help support the defence of all of Europe in a future where the American umbrella is full of holes and may not open at all.
They look at the rise of unbridled AI in a world with no rules and want to know how Europe is going to defend its people and their jobs from devastation as the American and Chinese superpowers engage in a brutal slugfest.
None of these questions can be answered by stock responses about the four freedoms or the ritual intonation of articles from the EU’s sacred texts. The problems are new, the circumstances are new, the answers will have to be new too. The leaders who confront these challenges, who face the risks head on and dare to dream about an ambitious and muscular European response will own the future. All the others will be swept into the dustbin of history, where those who are prisoners of the past belong.
