Дэниел Ханнан: политик, журналист и сторонник Brexit

British politician (born 1971)

Daniel John Hannan, Baron Hannan of Kingsclere (born 1 September 1971) is a British writer, journalist and politician. 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. A member of the Conservative Party, he was a Member of the European Parliament (MEP) for South East England from 1999 to 2020. 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.

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. 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.

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, 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.

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, 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 transition, empowered extremists on both sides, and led to Britain's failure to take advantage of many opportunities to relax or repeal EU legislation it had retained, leaving the UK in some ways more restrictive than some EU countries. a periodical publication in print volume and in an online version published quarterly. In an editorial, he defined its philosophy as follows:
"Conservatism is an instinct rather than an ideology. It is ironic, quizzical, cool tempered, distrustful of grand theories. Conservatives understand that the things they cherish – property rights, parliamentary government, personal freedom, norms of courtesy – take a long time to build up, but can be quickly destroyed."

In September 2020, Hannan was named an advisor to the British Board of Trade. Later, in December of that year, it was announced he would be conferred a life peerage after a nomination by Prime Minister Boris Johnson. In the morning of Monday 25 January 2021 he was created Baron Hannan of Kingsclere, of Kingsclere in the County of Hampshire.

Hannan is an advocate of localism. To that end, he supports replacing Value Added Tax with a local sales tax, set by local councils. These ideas were developed further in a series of six pamphlets, The Localist Papers, serialised in The Daily Telegraph in 2007.

Hannan has a 'deep admiration' of the United States, and describes himself as an Atlanticist with positive views of the United States as well as other nations of the Anglosphere. Hannan claims to be supportive of free trade, arguing that the European Union blocks trade with countries such as China, India and Ethiopia. He opposed the 2003 invasion of Iraq undertaken during the premiership of Tony Blair. He opposed British intervention in Libya. He endorsed then Democratic candidate Barack Obama for President on 18 October 2008 against John McCain. He stated that a McCain presidency would mean an "imperial overstretch", particularly arguing that the U. S. should have been preparing to leave Iraq immediately. Hannan regretted his endorsement, which he called in his blog his "single most unpopular post" in his blogging career, and backed Mitt Romney in 2012. He argued, "Any American reader who wants to know where Obamification will lead should spend a week with me in the European Parliament. I'm working in your future and, believe me, you won't like it." In the 2016 United States presidential election, Hannan argued that both main parties had put forward unfit candidates, and urged Americans to vote for the Libertarian, Gary Johnson.

Hannan provoked criticism in August 2009 when it emerged that he had praised the Conservative politician Enoch Powell as "somebody who understood the importance of national democracy, who understood why you need to live in an independent country and what that meant, as well as being a free marketeer and a small government Conservative." Hannan nonetheless disagrees with Powell's most famous policy view, his anti immigration stance, stating, "For what it's worth, I think Enoch Powell was wrong on immigration Being an immigrant myself, I have particular cause to be grateful for Britain's understated cosmopolitanism." Writing on The Telegraph website, Hannan said: "I'm surprised that no one has picked up on the thing that I most admire about Enoch Powell, namely his tendency to ignore conventional wisdom and think things through from first principles. Like Rowan Williams, he always did his hearers the courtesy of addressing them as intelligent adults. Both men regularly got into trouble in consequence, either because they were genuinely misunderstood or because their detractors affected to misunderstand them. Neither responded by dumbing down. That, in politics, takes a special kind of integrity."

The government's policy on the future relationship between the United Kingdom and the European Union that the Cabinet had discussed at Chequers was published as a White Paper on 12 July 2018 for debate in the House of Commons the following week. In July 2018, Hannan wrote in his Telegraph column regarding the Government's Chequers Proposal. Distinct from the Government's position and from that of the ERG, Hannan argued that MPs should vote for the proposal despite its shortcomings, so long as it is not "watered down further". Summarising, he wrote that "The question is not whether the White Paper is ideal, but whether an imperfect departure is better than either a hostile breakdown or a more subservient relationship". and would be preferable to one with the Liberal Democrats.

Writing in The Daily Telegraph, Hannan has argued that while the Good Friday Agreement was "often spoken about in quasi religious terms its flaws have become clearer over time." Hannan's account of the Good Friday Agreement has been criticised as factually inaccurate and reckless.

In a January 2019 article for The Daily Telegraph, Hannan wrote that Irish political party Fianna Fáil "won every Irish election" between 1932 and 2008. Fianna Fáil did receive the highest proportion of the vote out of any party at every election during those years. However, it came first in elections in said period, but failed to form the government in six of those elections. Hannan's statement led to online mockery in March 2019; on Twitter, some of those making fun of Hannan's statement used the hashtag "#HannanIrishHistory" to post incorrect facts about Irish history. Hannan, who is himself part Ulster Catholic responded to the mockery by writing on Twitter, "I managed a Double First in Modern History from Oxford. One of the things I was taught is that historians necessarily have different takes on the same events. Please try to accept that yours is not the only interpretation."

Hannan argued throughout the COVID 19 pandemic that the COVID 19 virus was not as serious to the general population as was widely believed. He was very critical of the UK government's response to the pandemic, arguing against restrictions on public mobility. Hannan joined other high profile critics, known as 'lockdown sceptics', such as Lord Sumption and Toby Young, in arguing that the full restrictive lockdown would have serious negative consequences, as a result of restrictions on civil liberties, locking down the population, and stalling the economy. He first expressed this view in February 2020 in an article he wrote in the website Conservative Home, and stuck to it consistently through the lockdown.

Hannan speaks English, French and Spanish. Hannan is a supporter of bullfighting and has written several articles in the Telegraph and elsewhere promoting the activity. In 2004, he wrote for the Telegraph that he had attended a training course with a California based bullfighting school in which he participated in a tienta, which aims to ascertain if cows can be used to breed fighting bulls for the ring. Additionally, he has written for the specialist English language bullfighting publication La Divisa, published by Club Taurino of London, a UK based association for 'aficionados.' In April 2022, the Evening Standard reported that he had written articles about this topic for The Critic magazine under the pseudonym of Christopher North.

In 2009, Hannan was awarded the Bastiat Prize for Online Journalism for his Telegraph blog. He won the award for Speech of the Year at the 2009 Spectator Awards, for his Gordon Brown speech in the European Parliament. He won the 2012 Columbia Award (Washington Policy Centre) and the 2014 Paolucci Book Award (Intercollegiate Studies Institute). Hannan was shortlisted for the Orwell Prize in blogging in 2011. In 2014, Hannan won the Political Books Awards polemic of the year award, for his book How We Invented Freedom and Why It Matters. In 2017, Hannan received the Whittaker Chambers Award from the National Review Institute in person from John O'Sullivan. The award was opposed by the family of Whittaker Chambers; David Chambers, Whittaker's grandson, wrote that Whittaker would have supported a strong European Union as a counterweight to "Russia's new Stalin, Vladimir Putin."