British High Commission, Canberra, 8 November 1967
Restricted
Press and other reaction in both Britain and Australia to Sir Alexander Downer’s ‘mini-campaign’ against British plans for EEC membership has been interesting and we thought you might like some assessment of it.
2. It seems to us that Sir A. Downer’s remarks have aroused remarkably little echo here. Those commentators who have analysed it have suggested that the campaign has in fact been conducted on Sir A Downer’s own initiative and represents no real expression of Commonwealth Government policy at home. The Melbourne AGE thought that Sir Alexander was showing himself as a ‘true-blue politician of the old school whose British admirers, even the warmest, could offer him no hope that his Cassandra utterances would influence either the Labour Government or the Conservative Opposition’. The AGE went on to question the habit of appointing former politicians to the high seat in Australia House, sometimes leading to ‘confident ramblings about private convictions’.
3. Peter Grose, the AUSTRALIAN’s London correspondent, remarked the irony of appointing Sir Alexander Downer to oversee a ‘painful reorientation of Anglo-Australian relations’ and others have noted the strange situation in which Sir A. Downer, as a professed Anglophile, finds himself at this time.
4. On balance, we conclude that we have lost nothing from the campaign and its crop of resultant comment. Indeed, the normally critical FINANCIAL REVIEW of Sydney has a pungent editorial, ‘A case for Dr Freud?’, concluding that the continued campaign to denigrate Britain’s policy towards Europe is at best neurotic and at worst cynically self-seeking.
5. As is often the case, the CANBERRA TIMES came out with a weighty summing-up, comparing and contrasting the publicly-expressed viewpoints of Sir A. Downer and Sir C. Johnston. The TIMES thought that Sir Alexander was speaking up for the Australia of Sir Robert Menzies and was being unrealistic and out of date in opposing British entry into Europe, even though his point that some links should be retained with Australia was of value. Sir Charles Johnston’s assessments, argued the paper, were, on the other hand, ‘realistic’ though the paper doubted whether Britain could hold her ground in the export stakes. The debate here has shown refreshing realism with little of the emotional overtones of Sir A Downer’s speeches to his British audiences.
[UKNA: FCO 20/50]