British politician (born 1971)
Daniel John Hannan, Baron Hannan of Kingsclere (born 1 September 1971) is a British writer, journalist and politician. A member of the Conservative Party, he was a Member of the European Parliament (MEP) for South East England from 1999 to 2020. He is currently a sitting member of the House of Lords where he takes the Conservative whip, and has since 2020 served as an adviser to the Board of Trade. He is the founding president of the Initiative for Free Trade.
Hannan was the first secretary-general of the Alliance of Conservatives and Reformists in Europe (ACRE), serving from 2009 to 2018. He was one of the founders of Vote Leave, one of the organisations that campaigned to leave the EU in 2016, and served on its board throughout the referendum. He played a prominent role in the referendum campaign, participating in a number of public debates. He stood down from the European Parliament at the United Kingdom's exit from the EU in 2020.
Lord Hannan of Kingsclere has written columns for "The Sunday Telegraph", the "International Business Times, ConservativeHome", and the "Washington Examiner", as well as occasional columns in the "Daily Mail", "The Guardian", "The Daily Telegraph", "The Sun", "The Spectator", and "The Wall Street Journal". He is editor-in-chief of "The Conservative", a quarterly journal of centre-right political thought. He has published several books.
Early life.
Hannan was born on 1 September 1971 in Lima, Peru. His mother was a Scot who had been working in the British Embassy in Lima. His father, whose family origins are Ulster Catholic, had been educated in the UK and had served in Italy during the Second World War with the North Irish Horse of the British Army. Hannan grew up on his parents' farm outside Lima, attending school and university in Britain. He was educated at Winchester House School and Marlborough College.
Hannan read Modern History at Oriel College, Oxford. He was active in university politics, being elected President of the Oxford University Conservative Association in 1992 – when Nicky Morgan was his opponent. As an undergraduate, he established the Oxford Campaign for an Independent Britain in 1990, a group which campaigned against closer EU integration – a theme that was to shape his later career.
On 12 September 1992, he organised a protest at the EU finance ministers' summit in Bath against membership of the European Exchange Rate Mechanism. Three days later, the pound was forced to leave the system in an event known as Black Wednesday. In an article published in "The Daily Telegraph", Hannan has claimed that his protest activities were connected with this event.
Early political career.
After graduating in 1993, Hannan became the first director of the European Research Group, an organisation for Eurosceptic Conservative MPs chaired by Michael Spicer. From 1994 to 1995, he served as Chairman of the National Association of Conservative Graduates.
In 1996, he became a leader-writer at "The Daily Telegraph" under Charles Moore. He wrote leaders for the paper until 2004, and has written blogs and columns ever since. Hannan has since contributed to "The Spectator" and many other newspapers and magazines around the world. In 1997, he became an adviser and speechwriter to Michael Howard, then Shadow Foreign Secretary.
In 2001, during the general election campaign, while already serving as an MEP, he wrote speeches for William Hague, the Conservative leader. In 1999 he stood down from his posts at the European Research Group and Conservative Graduates.
Member of the European Parliament.
Hannan was elected to the European Parliament in 1999. His first act on being elected was to write an article in "The Daily Telegraph" about the expenses and allowances available to MEPs, which caused great controversy.
In 2000, he launched a public appeal to support the underfunded "No" campaign in Denmark's referendum on joining the euro. "The Guardian" newspaper accused him of running the appeal from his parliamentary office, but withdrew the accusation when it was shown that he had, in fact, operated out of his own flat. Denmark ultimately voted against joining the euro.
Hannan was re-elected at the top of his party's list for the South East England constituency in 2004. He was re-elected again, in 2009 and 2014, each time at the head of the Conservative list – a ranking determined by party members in a postal ballot.
In December 2018, Hannan ranked 738 out of 751 MEPs for his participation in roll call votes in the European Parliament.
Campaign against the Lisbon Treaty.
One of Hannan's longest-running campaigns as an MEP was for a referendum – first on the European Constitution and then, when that text was revised and renamed, on the Lisbon Treaty. He would end every speech, whatever its subject, with a call, in Latin, for the Lisbon treaty to be put to the vote: ""Pactio Olisipiensis censenda est". The words were a deliberate echo of Cato the Elder, the Roman Senator who ended every speech with a call for Carthage to be destroyed: "Carthago delenda est"".
When no referendum was forthcoming, Hannan began to use parliamentary procedure to draw attention to his campaign. Under the rules as they then stood, all MEPs were allowed to speak for up to 60 seconds following the vote on each matter on which they had voted, a procedure known as "Explanations of Vote". In 2008, he organised a multi-national rota of Eurosceptic MEPs to speak on every permissible vote, always ending their speeches by calling for a referendum on Lisbon.
The campaign served to delay proceedings, and the President of the European Parliament, Hans-Gert Pöttering, declared that he should have a discretionary right to disallow any such interventions when he was "convinced that these are manifestly intended to cause, and will result in, a prolonged and serious obstruction of the procedures of the House or the rights of other Members" (Rule 20, para 1).
Following this intervention when Hannan continued speaking after his allocated time, he was interrupted and had his microphone cut off by Luigi Cocilovo, one of the 14 Vice-Presidents.
Hannan reacted by likening the European Parliament to 1930s Germany: ;templatestyles src="Template:Blockquote/styles.css" / ;An absolute majority is not the same as the rule of law. I accept that there is a minority in this house in favour of a referendum. That there is a minority in this house against the ratification of the Lisbon Treaty. But this house must nonetheless follow its own rulebooks. And by popular acclamation to discard the rules under which we operate is indeed an act of arbitrary and despotic rule. It is only my regard for you Mr. Chairman and my personal affection for you that prevents me from likening it to the "Ermächtigungsgesetz of 1933" which was also voted through by a parliamentary majority.
In response to this the EPP leader, Joseph Daul, initiated proceedings to expel Hannan from the group. At the relevant meeting, Hannan told members that the ideological differences between him and the majority of EPP members on the question of European integration made his expulsion their only logical choice. He duly left the group on 20 February 2008, and sat as a non-attached (non-inscrit) member until the rest of the British Conservatives followed to form the European Conservatives and Reformists following the 2009 election.
Hannan, who had campaigned against EPP membership since before his election, rejoined his colleagues in the new ECR Group in 2009, and became the first Secretary-General of its attached Euro-party, AECR, subsequently ACRE.
While Secretary-General, ACRE has attracted criticism over spending of EU funds to promote events which are of limited relevance or benefit to the EU. On 10 December 2018, European parliament senior leaders ordered ACRE to repay €535,609 (£484,367) of EU funds adjudged to have been spent on inappropriate events, including €250,000 spent on a three-day event at a luxury beach resort in Miami and €90,000 spent on a trade "summit" at a five-star hotel on the shores of Lake Victoria in Kampala. Parliament authorities suggest that Hannan used EU funds for ACRE to support other pet projects, such as his free-trade thinktank, the Initiative for Free Trade (IFT), as well as Conservatives International.
"The devalued Prime Minister" speech.
On 24 March 2009, after Gordon Brown had given a short speech to the European Parliament in Strasbourg in advance of the G20 London summit, Hannan followed up by delivering a 3-minute speech strongly criticising the response by Gordon Brown to the global financial crisis. He finished the speech with the phrase, "the devalued Prime Minister of a devalued government", which was a quote taken from a 1992 speech by then-Labour Party leader John Smith about then-Prime Minister John Major. A video clip of the speech went viral on YouTube that evening It eventually got over 3 million views, and two years later remained the most-watched YouTube video of any UK politician.
The video of the speech brought Hannan to prominence in both the UK and elsewhere around the world, notably the United States. In the following months, Hannan appeared both via satellite and in person on various Fox News shows, including those of Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck and Neil Cavuto. Given that the United States was then in the middle of a debate about the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, Hannan was often asked about the benefits of the British National Health Service. Hannan generally criticized the NHS, saying it "puts the power of life and death in the hands of a state bureaucracy".
Hannan later said that he was "slightly perplexed" at the popularity of the speech, given that he had made similar speeches before. However, he was pleased with the outcome, saying that it showed that, with the rise of the internet, "political reporters no longer get to decide what's news", which he felt was "good news for libertarians of every stripe."
Campaign to leave the EU.
Hannan, being one of the founders of the Vote Leave campaign, was at the forefront of the 2016 Referendum on membership of the European Union. Described in "The Guardian" as "the man who brought you Brexit", the "Financial Times" described his Oxford Campaign for an Independent Britain as the start of the Brexit movement.
Along with Douglas Carswell, Hannan is credited with being "part of the hard core who kept the flame of Tory Euroscepticism burning – and tirelessly promoted their own positive, internationalist case for Britain's exit from the EU in parallel to Farage's negative, isolationist one." As he was about to graduate in 1992, Hannan wrote to Tory rebels who were against the Maastricht Treaty in 1992; together they created the European Research Group, with Hannan as their secretary.
Hannan claims the name was intentionally innocuous, since the group worked unabashedly against the single currency and the ECJ. He was involved in the creation of the Congress for Democracy, an umbrella organisation for various Eurosceptic groups, which reportedly contained both trade union shop stewards and UKIP activists.
On Twitter, Hannan claimed that "it's irresponsible to scare EU nationals in the UK by hinting their status might change after Brexit. No one's suggesting such a thing". This was despite the government's wish to make EU nationals apply for "settled status" to remain in the UK.
In an interview in 2015 Hannan asserted that "absolutely nobody is talking about threatening our place in the single market." Seven years later, he began a "Daily Telegraph" column with "Staying in the single market, or large parts of it, would have saved us a lot of trouble", noting that that statement had long been treated as a "pledge" and used to discredit him Critics of Brexit treated that as a major concession on his part, given his lengthy advocacy for the UK to leave the EU long before 2016.
Hannan clarified that what he had always advocated was that after leaving the EU, the UK should rejoin the European Free Trade Association, of which it had been a founding member, and thus retain what benefits of the single market it felt it should. Given the narrow success of the referendum, he emphasized that it was important that an agreement on the terms of Britain's departure have broad support from both sides, and he believed that would have been a start. Had Cameron's successor been an enthusiastic Leave supporter, Hannan believed, that would have come to pass and the UK would have left the EU earlier than it ultimately did. May's support for retaining freedom of movement above all else hampered that