The EU plans to defy Tory Brexiters and retain its offices in London – the former Conservative central office at 32 Smith Square – as an outpost from which to communicate with British citizens after Brexit, leaked documents reveal.
High-profile Brexiters had called last year for the EU to hand back the large red-brick building that was previously Margaret Thatcher’s headquarters and the scene of her general election victories.
The European commission and the European parliament jointly purchased the Westminster building for £20m in 2010 after 50 years of Tory ownership, and renamed it Europe House.
Jacob Rees-Mogg MP, the chairman of the European Research Group, had suggested it would be a “wonderful” gesture of goodwill if, during the negotiations over the UK’s £39bn divorce bill, the building was returned.
But a leaked note on the administrative consequences of Brexit, seen by the Guardian, makes clear that the EU is keen to retain the advantages of the building and its plum position close to the houses of parliament in Westminster.
Klaus Welle, the European parliament’s secretary general, said the EU would need a position from which to champion the interests of its own citizens living in the UK, and to communicate its messages to the British.
“In the UK, parliament has established offices in London [the ‘Europe House’ shared with the European commission] and Edinburgh,” Welle, a former senior official in Angela Merkel’s German Christian Democratic Union party, wrote in the message to the chamber’s political leadership.
The EU’s office in Scotland was established close to Edinburgh Castle in 1975, the year of the UK’s first referendum on the then EEC, in order for Brussels to build contacts with local politicians. The office in London comprises eight floors and has an area of approximately 34,000 square feet.
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