Incoming European Commission chief Ursula von der Leyen revealed today that she spent a year in London in the 1970s hiding from notorious German communist terrorists.
She spent 12 months in the ‘seething, international, colourful city’ to avoid the baader-Meinhof Gang, a hard Left group that carried out a string of bomb attacks and assassinations.
While in Britain she called herself Rose Ladson – the name of her American great-grandmother – to avoid detection.
The revelation came as European Council President Donald Tusk asked the European Parliament to approve her appointment as the next president of the European Commission.
‘For the first time, we achieved perfect gender balance in the top positions. Europe is not only talking about women, it is choosing women,’ Mr Tusk told the assembly this morning, which will vote on her appointment to a five-year term later this month.
Mrs von der Leyen was an economics undergraduate at the University of Göttingen in the 1970s but admitted she ‘lived much more than I studied’ while in the UK.
Ursula von der Leyen was welcomed to the European Commission today by outgoing president Jean-Claude Juncker in Brussels today
The German defence minister, who is due to take up her new post in November if confirmed by MEPs, is a keen equestrian
Ursula with her centre-right politician father Ernst Albrecht and mother Heidi-Adele Albrecht in 178, the year she went to live in London to escape communist terrorists in Germany
The German defence minister, who will square off against the next prime minister over Brexit if and when she takes up her new post in November, made the admission in an interview with German newspaper Die Zeit.
She said that there had been sympathisers with the Red Army Faction – also known as the Red Army Faction – in the university in Göttingen and the local police advised her father, who was prime minister of Lower Saxony, to move her away.
She refused to give details of her party lifestyle while in London, telling the paper: ‘In 1978 I immersed myself for one year in this seething, international, colourful city.
‘For me, coming from the rather monotonous, white Germany, that was fascinating.
‘For me, London was the epitome of modernity: freedom, the joy of life, trying everything. This gave me an inner freedom that I have kept until today.
‘And another thing I have kept: the realisation that different cultures can get on together very well.’
She added: ‘The British were polite, open, tolerant, but at the weekend they went out to the countryside to be very British among themselves. The international residents stayed in the city.
‘Since then, I know that despite their openness to the world, the British are always self-reliant. The Germans tend toward over-enthusiasm in European affairs, the French to emotion, the Italians are striking with their talent for improvisation.
Mrs von der Leyen on horseback in 1976 when she was in her teens
Happy. Two years after this 1976 picture the youngster was forced to flee to London to escape the Red Army Faction
‘The British ground all this with their scepticism, their understatement and their great pragmatism. When the British leave the EU, the high-blown will dominate, and the Union could lose its grip. So we need the British.’
Ursula von der Leyen is the daughter of Brussels-born Eurocrat Ernst Albrecht, a senior German politician who worked in the EU Commission in the 1950s.
It meant she spent her early years in the Belgian capital and partly explains her fanatic eurofederalism.
The politician has seven children: (left to right), Sophie, Egmont, Donata, Gracia, Johanna, David and Victoria
The German defence secretary, who takes over from Jean-Claude Juncker as EU Commission president, has called for a ‘United States of Europe’ with its own army. The mother-of-seven has a medical degree and studied at the London School of Economics as well as Stanford in the US.
The qualified gynaecologist only entered politics in her 40s, but regularly emerges in opinion polls as one of Germany’s most popular politicians.
She has been Angela Merkel’s defence secretary since 2013, but became mired in controversy over the awarding of contracts – for which she was eventually exonerated – and has faced criticism about gaps in military readiness.
She was once seen as a potential replacement to German Chancellor Mrs Merkel, but the contracts controversy saw her fade from contention.
The 60-year-old speaks fluent English and French – a crucial qualification for her new role.
Meet the new EU presidents who make Donald Tusk & Co look like saints: One has a criminal conviction and the other is mired in controversy
Whether you are for or against Brexit, the EU has hardly enhanced its reputation through the behaviour of its top brass.
President of the EU Commission, Jean-Claude Juncker, and EU Council President Donald Tusk have shown themselves to be stubborn, unimaginative and keener on political point scoring than securing a Withdrawal deal which is best for everyone.
Now, finally, it is all change at the top of the EU. But if you were hoping for better qualified, more competent EU leaders then dream on.
Two of the EU’s new guard: Ursula von der Leyen (left) and Christine Lagarde
Two of the EU’s new guard, Christine Lagarde, who has no experience of banking but has been appointed head of the European Central Bank, and Ursula von der Leyen, Juncker’s replacement as President of the Commission although she’s proved a lamentable Defence Minister in her native Germany, hardly inspire confidence. There are questions, too, over their integrity.
So just who are they and how did they come to be appointed?
Fighter jets and helicopters that don’t fly, warships and submarines that cannot put out to sea, guns that miss the target when they get too hot, and a lack of everything from ammunition to underwear.
That, it is claimed, is the parlous state of the German Army under the tenure of the country’s Defence Minister and now President of the European Commission.
Her elevation to the top job in Europe is said to be her reward for political loyalty to Angela Merkel rather than any display of competence as a member of the Chancellor’s government since 2005.
Others say it is a classic case of someone whose services are no longer required being ‘booted upstairs’.
Indeed, Von der Leyen, who in 2013 was appointed as the first female Defence Minister, has only united German politicians across the political divide in questioning her suitability for her new role.
One described her as ‘the weakest member’ of the German government and others call her ‘the soloist’ owing to her tendency to act on her own without consulting others.
‘No matter where you look, there’s dysfunction,’ a senior German officer at Bundeswehr HQ told the Politico website.
Last December, Von der Leyen was called before a parliamentary committee to answer charges over alleged poor handling of defence contracts, which in some cases involved suspected nepotism.
In one scandal, the costs of repairing a naval training vessel spiralled from 10 million to 135 million euros.
The Bundestag is currently holding hearings into accusations that Von der Leyen’s office circumvented public procurement rules in granting contracts worth millions of euros to private firms.
Von der Leyen, now 60, is proud of her roots; of her wealthy cotton merchant ancestors in Bremen
However, none of this seems to have harmed the progress of a woman born into the ‘EU aristocracy’. The daughter of Ernst Albrecht, one of the original Eurocrats when the European Economic Community was formed in 1957, she was brought up in Brussels where she attended the famous European School.
It was an upbringing, rubbing shoulders with the middle-class children of other well-to-do Eurocrats, which led to her becoming a fervent enthusiast for European integration.
In 2011, von der Leyen called for a ‘United States of Europe’ — something which the ultra-federalist may well use her new role to bring to fruition.
She is, of course, fiercely anti-Brexit, describing events since the referendum as a ‘burst bubble of hollow promises… inflated by populists’ and last year saying that Brexit is a ‘loss for everyone’.
Von der Leyen, now 60, is proud of her roots; of her wealthy cotton merchant ancestors in Bremen, while her husband of 33 years, Heiko von der Leyen, a medical professor and CEO of a medical engineering firm, is a descendant of an even posher family of silk-weavers.
When Von der Leyen came to study at the London School of Economics in 1978, her family wealth was feared to put her at the risk of kidnap by the Red Army Faction — a German far-left terrorist group. She studied economics under the pseudonym ‘Rose Ladson’. Later, she switched to medicine, was awarded a doctorate in 1990, and practised as a gynaecologist — giving birth to seven children herself between 1987-1999. The family are Lutheran Evangelical Christians.
Her academic career, however, threatened to unwind in 2016 when she was accused of plagiarism in her doctoral thesis. After an investigation, Hanover Medical School decided that Von der Leyen was guilty only of a mistake, not intentional copying.
Just before Christmas in 2016, in the very room in the Palais de Justice in Paris where Marie- Antoinette was sentenced to be guillotined, Christine Lagarde, head of the International Monetary Fund, was found guilty of ‘negligence with public money’ over a multi-million Euro payout to a business tycoon.
Yet, unlike the French queen, Lagarde escaped with barely a slap on the wrist. The court waived a one-year prison sentence and a 15,000 euro fine, on the grounds of her ‘international reputation’ which, cynics might observe, is a rather rum approach to justice.
Lagarde was finance minister in Nicolas Sarkozy’s government in 2007 when she approved a 404million euro payout (£363m) of taxpayers’ money to a controversial French businessman and friend of Sarkozy, Bernard Tapie.
It was a long-running case that revolved around the sale by Tapie of his majority share in sportswear company Adidas to a bank, Credit Lyonnais, part owned by the state.
Lagarde is famously outspoken on Brexit — claiming she can’t see ‘any positive side to it’
When the bank sold the shares at a higher price, Tapie accused it of defrauding him and the payment was in effect compensation awarded by a private arbitration panel.
Lagarde was convicted for failing to contest the panel’s ruling when there were solid grounds for doing so. She insisted that she had only ever done her duty and may have been misled by civil servants.
The verdict on the high profile case did nothing to dent Lagarde’s career. Within 24 hours, the IMF — Sarkozy had lobbied hard for her to get the job in 2011 — in Washington DC gave her their full backing.
And so she has continued on her trail-blazing way ever since — to her likely new appointment as President of the European Central Bank.
With her penchant for Chanel suits and Hermes scarves, Lagarde is known as the ‘rock star of finance’. But unusually for the putative head of a central bank she has no banking experience.
She herself has acknowledged her limitations in the field, saying in 2012: ‘I’ve studied a bit of economics, but I’m not a super-duper economist.’
Lagarde is famously outspoken on Brexit — claiming she can’t see ‘any positive side to it’ — and an ally of former Chancellor George Osborne and the Project Fear cadre. At a press conference in 2016 with Osborne, she warned Brexit would be ‘pretty bad, to very, very bad’.
Lagarde also chooses to ignore that the IMF’s predictions for the UK have been consistently wrong.
At 63, she exerts discipline over every aspect of her life — a teetotal vegetarian who works out every day, swims, and cycles up to 20 miles a week.
She has enjoyed an intriguing love life, married and divorced twice, with two sons in their 30s with her first husband.
Her current partner is old love, Xavier Giocanti, a Corsican businessman she met at law school.