Stanley Johnson: Why I remain a fan of Brussels

Brussels! In these last hectic days before the referendum, the very word has an ominous ring. It conjures up “faceless bureaucrats”, “unelected commissioners”, and “a mountainous burden of regulation”. But my feelings about the city are quite different. For me, it has long been a place of light and joy. 

In April 1973, a few weeks after Britain joined the EEC, as it was then known, I was appointed head of the European Commission’s newly established Prevention of Pollution Division. As a committed environmentalist, this was a superb job to have. It meant I could help roll out vital measures of environmental protection. But there was much more to it than that. Brussels was a great place to bring up a family. We bought a house in the leafy suburb of Uccle and, most days, I cycled to work. My first wife, Charlotte, painted in her studio, and our four young children – Boris, Rachel, Leo and Jo – went to the European School. We were “good Europeans” and proud of it. We had a mass of Belgian friends, too.

Then in 1979, with the first direct elections to the European Parliament, I was elected MEP for Hampshire East and the Isle of Wight. I think it is fair to say that the vast majority of the 61 Conservative MEPs who were elected in 1979 were enthusiasts for Europe. I certainly was. Nowadays, of course, the situation has changed. 

The Leavers argue that the EU is too bureaucratic, that it costs too much, that it is undemocratic and that the direction of travel is wrong. The word “Brussels” is, to be honest, full of negative connotations.

For someone like me, who has spent two or more decades living and working in the Belgian capital, this is sad. I don’t think the European project deserves to be dismissed out of hand. Yes, there is a lot wrong with the EU, but nothing in my view that determined engagement on the part of Britain and other like-minded states cannot put right. So I disagree with the Brexiteers – including Boris. I think, instead, that we should remain in the EU and fight for change. That’s why, with Baroness Young, I founded Environmentalists for Europe (environmentalistsforeurope.org) with a view to making it clear that, in this field at least, EU-wide measures are if not essential, then certainly highly desirable.

But there is more to Brussels than politics – and the tendency people have to pour scorn on Brussels as a political project seems to involve heavy collateral damage as far as Brussels the city is concerned. Whatever happens to Brussels as the Capital of Europe, Brussels the city has both a great past and – I hope – a glorious future. For a start, getting there is much easier than it was. In the old days, it would take me 12 hours to drive from Exmoor to Uccle, including the time spent crossing the Channel on the ferry from Dover to Dunkirk. Yet last Friday, when my wife Jenny and I made a return visit to the Belgian capital after several years’ absence, two painless hours on the Eurostar, starting from St Pancras international, brought us to Brussels’ Gare du Midi. And 20 minutes later we were at the Hotel Amigo.

I can honestly say that in all the years I’ve been coming to Brussels I’ve never stayed at the Amigo. Of course, I knew about it by repute. Back in the early Seventies, I remember talking to a British diplomat who, a few months earlier, had been closely involved with negotiating Britain’s entry to the EEC.

“The great thing about the Amigo, old boy,” he told me, “is that you can take the lift from the underground garage straight up to the floor your room is on without having to pass through the hotel lobby!” He tapped a finger to the side of his nose. Strange, what these diplomats can get up to. No wonder they gave away our fishing rights at the crucial moment in the negotiations.

Of course, there are plenty of other things to say about the Amigo, including the fact that it’s the finest luxury hotel in all of Brussels and that, in the days when the building was used a prison, Verlaine was incarcerated there after a tiff with Rimbaud. We stayed in a suite with a view of the Grand Place’s town hall, the Hotel de Ville. Frankly, I think we’d still be there if we hadn’t booked our return tickets on the train. As it was, we didn’t linger. Our 48-hour Brussels Card passes were crying out to be used. 

These passes not only cover 31 museums in Brussels (including for example the Museum of the Belgian Brewers and Choco-Story Brussels) they also allowed us to make use of the Hop-On, Hop-Off City Sightseeing Busses. There are two routes in the Hop-On, Hop-Off scheme. In both cases the busses leave from the Central Station. Line one goes north, towards the Atomium, the giant model of a nuclear atom which was the symbol of the 1958 World’s Fair in Brussels. Line two goes south past the Sablon, then down Avenue Louise towards the house where Victor Horta, probably the most famous practitioner of Belgium’s Art Nouveau period at the end of the 19th century, lived and worked. 

We plumped for Line two. We had been to the Atomium when we lived in Brussels but, amazingly, we had neither of us been to the Horta House.

Technology is a wonderful thing. On that brilliantly sunny Friday afternoon, as we sat on the top deck of the bus with an earpiece plugged in our ear, a cultured voice explained: “Brussels is 'the capital of Art Nouveau’. At the end of the 19th century, Belgium underwent a spectacular industrial boom. A prosperous and progressive middle class wanted new, better and more original houses and Art Nouveau provided at least part of the answer. There are a thousand Art Nouveau houses in Brussels.”

Thus enlightened, we spent three-quarters of an hour in the Horta House, absorbing the light and colour of the rooms themselves as well as admiring almost every piece of furniture, from inkstands to sofas. 

On the way back, we “hopped-off” in the Grand Sablon to have tea at the celebrated tea-cake-and-chocolate café known as Wittamer. For me, this was a trip down memory lane. During my last stint in Brussels, I wrote a novel called The Commissioner, a thriller set in the city and featuring an ex-MP called James Morton. The novel was subsequently made into a film and featured in the competition section of the 1998 Berlin Film Festival.

“When they filmed the book,” I told Jenny as we sat at one of Wittamer’s open-air tables, “John Hurt played the title role of Morton, who has a flat above Wittamer. Someone tries to blow him up by exploding a bomb. My Belgian friends were very upset. I don’t think they minded what happened to the Commissioner but they were shocked at the idea of Wittamer and the chocolates being blown up!”

Of course, I can’t help paying tribute here to the magnificent spirit displayed by the Bruxellois, following the recent atrocities at Zaventem airport and Maelbeek metro station. The best way, I am sure, to demonstrate true solidarity with those who suffered from these outrages is not to avoid the Belgian capital, but to head for it at the earliest possible moment, with a heart full of compassion and a wallet loaded with spending money. You will be welcomed with open arms.

We hopped off the bus for the last time at Central Station, back where we started, and headed for the Grand Place. Even back in 1973, I recognised that Brussels’ heart had suffered a considerable battering over recent years. The city’s ancient walls had, at the end of the Fifties, been demolished to make way for a ring road. High-rise hotels had been constructed which should never have been allowed. Individual houses, and even whole streets, had been knocked down which should have been conserved. 

And yet the essential magic of the Grand Place remained. This was – and is – truly one of the greatest sights of Northern Europe. In my judgment the accolade of World Heritage Site, accorded by Unesco, is entirely deserved. Last weekend, the Grand Place was as stirring and as beautiful as it has ever been. Perhaps this was due to the fact that, owing to recent events, the great hordes of people who gather there in the evening had not materialised. Perhaps I was simply registering the contrast between the wonder of the place and the recent horrors to which Brussels, through no fault of its own, has been subject.

We paused in front of Maison du Cygne building, now home to a celebrated restaurant of that name. It sparked a memory. “Do you remember when your mother took us here for dinner?” I said to my wife. “I kept on dropping my napkin on the floor by accident and each time the waiter handed me a new one. I think I did it five times altogether. It was terribly embarrassing.”

We spent the morning of the next day in the Musée des Beaux Arts. Our guide, Maria Kollaki, took us from masterpiece to masterpiece, while imparting her insights. In front of Quintin Metsys’ Virgin and Child, for example, she pointed to the Virgin’s hair, pulled back from the forehead to give an impression of baldness. “Women would shave their heads too. Or put bats’ blood on the skin to stop the hair coming back, or powder made of lead, which could result in lead poisoning.”

In a room full of magnificent Bruegels, we saw Pieter Breugel the Elder’s Fall of Icarus and I was at once reminded of W H Auden’s poem, inspired by the paintings and entitled “The Musée des Beaux Arts”. Icarus falls from the sky but, as Auden puts it, the torturer’s horse goes on “scratching its innocent behind on a tree,” while the “expensive delicate ship that must have seen something amazing, a boy falling, had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on”.

Was this a metaphor for Brexit, too, I wondered, as I stood there. Would the EU ship of state “sail calmly on”, barely noticing if Britain left?

Our last stop that morning was the Magritte Museum. Opened to the public in 2009, the Magritte Museum has been a colossal success, with two million visitors in the last seven years. We stopped in front of Magritte’s famous canvass: The Return, painted in 1940, the year I was born. The dove is shown as a blue bird with clouds against a starry sky. Later Sabena, the Belgian national airline, adopted the image as its symbol. According to Maria, “Magritte said the Sabena deal 'buttered a lot of spinach.’ ”

And then, after lunch, we visited the EU institutions: the European Parliament’s vast new hemicycle behind the old Gare Leopold; the menacingly chunky EU Council buildings on the Rue de la Loi; and the famous, gigantic, star-shaped edifice known as the Berlaymont which houses the European Commission. There is no doubt that the expansion of EU buildings has wrought havoc with some of the old quartiers in Brussels. Many no doubt feel that this is a price worth paying, though it is not clear to me that the people who have paid the price, in terms of lost homes and neighbourhoods, are necessarily the same as those who have reaped the rewards. I looked up towards the Berlaymont, where I had had my first office. How lucky I had been, I thought, to have had a perfect job at a perfect time. And what a tragedy it was that things seem in recent years to have gone so wrong when they had once been so full of promise.

As we stood there, an old friend,  David Haworth, walked past. I hadn’t seen him for years. “What are you doing in town, Stanley?” he asked.

“Writing an article about Brussels,” I said. “The famous sights, like the Grand Place. But I can’t leave out the EU. That’s part of the story too, whether you like it or not.”

Getting there

Stanley Johnson travelled to Brussels as a guest of Eurostar (08432 186186; eurostar.com), which operates up to 10 daily services from London St Pancras International, with fares from £29 one-way. Eurostar tickets also allow two-for-one entry to some of the city’s most popular museums and galleries.

Staying there

The Hotel Amigo, (0032 2547 4747; telegraph.co.uk/hotelamigo) at Rue de l’Amigo 1-3, offers doubles from £141.

Shopping there

Wittamer chocolatier is at Place du Grand Sablon 12-13 (0032 2512 3742; wittamer.com).

Visiting there

Tickets for the Hop-On, Hop-Off Brussels sightseeing bus (citysightseeingbrussel.be) cost from €23 (£18) for 24 hours.

Museum of Fine Arts of Belgium, (0032 2508 3211; fine‑arts-museum.be), at Rue de la Régence 3. Admission €8 or €13 for a combination ticket with the Magritte Museum (musee-magritte-museum.be). Brussels is currently celebrating 100 Masterpieces, showcasing the best of the Brussels museums’ collections. 

More information

visitflanders.com