David Harley was an official at the European Parliament, ending his career as deputy secretary-general. Most of the entries in these diaries are from the period when he was successively Parliament's director of press and media (1999-2002), spokesman for Parliament's president Pat Cox (2002-2004) and secretary-general of the Socialist Group (2004-2007). Based on the detailed notebooks he kept at the time, the diaries are a faithful and unvarnished record of meetings of political figures around Europe, in Washington and the Middle East. The period of most of the diary entries was one which...
David Harley was an official at the European Parliament, ending his career as deputy secretary-general. Most of the entries in these diaries are from ...
The positive contribution of the British MEPs to Europe was rarely acknowledged in their own country, making them for the most part a "forgotten tribe". Usually, indeed, the British media were only interested in the Eurosceptic voices among them. Nonetheless, in the words of former UK permanent representative Ivan Rogers: "The EU as a whole benefitted hugely from the expertise, the wisdom, the breadth, the temperament, the professionalism, the humour and even the constructive healthy scepticism of so many good British MEPs over the decades. Those contributions won't be forgotten, and the...
The positive contribution of the British MEPs to Europe was rarely acknowledged in their own country, making them for the most part a "forgotten tribe...