The Aachen Memorandum

The Aachen Memorandum, a 1996 thriller by Andrew Roberts, imagines a future where Britain has become a minor, subordinate part of a protectionist, illiberal, and anti-American European Union. Roberts himself called it a dystopian vision of what the country might become. The story begins with a fictional 2015 referendum on joining a United States of Europe under a Treaty of Aachen, which passes by a narrow margin of 51.86% to 48.14%. Thirty years later, the anti-hero, Oxford historian Horatio Lestocq, uncovers evidence that the vote was rigged by a pro-European elite. After a series of violent events—including murder and an assassination attempt on Prince William Mountbatten-Windsor, the son of the then-reigning King Charles III—Lestocq exposes the fraud. This leads to the restoration of an independent UK, and he is rewarded with a baronetcy and the editorship of *The Times* after the EU’s ‘Classlessness Directive’ is repealed.

The novel makes satirical predictions about real people from its 1996 perspective. Among those arrested in 2016 as members of the underground Anti-Federalist Movement are Matthew d’Ancona, former Welsh MP Hywel Williams, former cabinet minister Iain Duncan Smith, broadcaster Niall Ferguson, and Michael Gove of the European Broadcasting Corporation. John Redwood, having escaped from Parkhurst Prison, leads the ‘Free British Office’ in Oslo in 2045.

The book's fictional 2015 referendum on joining a United States of Europe is sometimes mistaken for a prediction of the actual 2016 Brexit referendum. In its fictional campaign, business leaders warn of mass unemployment if the “No” side wins, and the “chattering classes” overwhelmingly back the “Yes” campaign, which is well-funded by the government. London votes clearly to join the Union, while the north-east of England votes against by 56% to 44%. However, the novel's fictional results show Northern Ireland and Scotland voting to leave the UK and join the United States of Europe—a different question and outcome from the actual 2016 Brexit vote.

Reviews of the book were critical. *Socialist Review* called Roberts “a right wing Thatcherite historian” and argued that any European superstate in 2045 would be built on cuts to welfare and attacks on workers’ organisation, run by the Thatcherites he admires.