13 November 2014

European Voice: Jonathan Hill – charming consensus-builder

When Lord Hill of Oareford was unveiled as the UK’s designate European Commissioner in July, the reaction in Brussels came in two forms. The first was the question:“Lord Who?” The second was an observation that he must be a Eurosceptic. While the latter claim had to be dismissed by Jonathan Hill’s friends in the British Labour Party, the “Lord Who” quip did not bother him at all. After all, this is a man described by Sunday Times columnist Camilla Cavendish as possessing an “almost pathological modesty”, while a former ministerial colleague says he “absolutely does not seek the limelight, meaning he is consistently underestimated”.

Even before British Prime Minister David Cameron took the unprecedented step of voting against Jean-Claude Juncker’s Commission presidency, it was assumed that he would send a high-profile former cabinet minister to the Berlaymont, the Commission’s headquarters. Only names like former conservative leaders William Hague or Michael Howard could, it was said, restore British influence inside the institutions, bag a strategic dossier and lessen the odds that the UK votes to quit the European Union after 2017.

Yet to the astonishment of many, when Juncker unveiled his college line-up it was the unflashy 54-year-old Hill who had hit the bullseye: commissioner for financial stability, financial services and capital-markets union. Winning this position was largely down to painstaking diplomacy and suited Juncker’s strategy of giving the big powers their target dossiers, but it was also due in no small part to Hill himself.

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