Exactly when the prime minister became a Eurosceptic
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is not easily pinpointed, not least because the changing role and
aspirations of the European Community during the seventies and eighties altered the terms in which the debate was framed. Without demonstrating Edward Heath’s ideological zeal, Thatcher had
unhesitatingly campaigned for the UK to remain in the EEC (as it then was) in the referendum of 1975, appearing to see the ‘Common Market’ firstly as an economic and political adhesive
to keep NATO’s Western European countries together in the face of the communist threat from the Warsaw Pact, and secondly as the creator of treaty obligations that would prevent a future
Labour government from establishing a socialist siege economy through high tariff barriers against Britain’s nearest trading neighbours. Beyond this, her enthusiasm was muted. During the 1979
elections to the European Parliament, she stated her opposition to a ‘fully fledged federal union’ and ‘a new super-state’ – remote though those possibilities then
seemed. Preferring to focus on practicalities, her Brussels diplomacy during her first term was dominated by a bruising and tenaciously fought battle (the substance of which she won) to limit the
scale of the UK’s otherwise disproportionately large contribution to the Community’s budget.
Most tellingly of all, unlike many of her Tory colleagues – or, indeed, a large swathe of those in public life generally – Thatcher never demonstrated personal ‘European’
credentials. Being no great lover of holidays, travel was not the means through which she broadened her mind. Her cultural interests and social life were directed towards the
‘Anglosphere’, and the Anglo-American relationship in particular, rather than to friendships with ‘continentals’. Following Gorbachev’s rise to power in 1985, she
developed a better rapport with the general secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union than with any leader from the European Community. With West Germany’s Chancellor, Helmut Kohl,
there was no warmth. Italy changed its prime minister ten times during Thatcher’s tenure in Downing Street and, as far as London was concerned, whoever was in office in Rome was usually
irrelevant anyway. And while she was thankful for François Mitterrand’s support during the Falklands War and content to establish with him the physical bonding of the
entente
cordiale
through the construction of the Channel Tunnel (arguably a more practical continental commitment than was achieved by any of her three immediate successors in Downing Street), she was
never likely to regard the French president or the philosophical traditions he represented as being in step with her own attitudes.
Obliged to attend bicentenary of the fall
of the Bastille in July 1989, she bridled at the suggestion that the French Revolution represented the birth of Western liberty. As she reminded readers of
Le Monde
, Britons had gained their
Bill of Rights a hundred years earlier and without recourse to the guillotine.
It was not Mitterrand but his former finance minister who became Thatcher’s European bête noir. On 6 July 1988, the president of the European Commission, Jacques Delors, delivered a
speech to the European Parliament in which he boasted that within ten years ‘80 percent of laws affecting the economy and social policy would be passed at a European and not a national
level’.
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On 8 September, Delors addressed the TUC conference in Bournemouth, where he received a standing ovation for calling upon trade
unionists to see Brussels as their salvation and the defender of workers’ rights against the free market. It was a sign that British politics was going through a major realignment, for, like
the union delegates, the Parliamentary Labour Party was reversing its prejudices. Having fought the 1983 general election promising to take the UK out of the European Community, and going to the
1987 polls with a manifesto that papered over the issue by only referring to the Community in passing, it now saw both short-term opportunity and long-term advantage in being less critical of
Brussels. The more that the Conservative leader riled against European integration, the less critical of the process became the Labour leader (and future European commissioner), with only Bryan
Gould among Kinnock’s senior front-bench colleagues continuing to resist conversion.
On 20 September 1988, two weeks after Delors’s mission to Bournemouth and while he was busy with his committee devising the route to economic and monetary union, Thatcher delivered her
riposte. A speaking engagement at the College of Europe in Bruges was the sort of occasion for which platitudes were usually deemed appropriate and the early drafts suggested by the Foreign Office
contained all the usual
communitaire
genuflections. The problem was that the prime minister was no longer in the mood for this sort of self-effacement and duly worked with her like-minded
private secretary for foreign affairs, Charles Powell, to craft arguably the single most historically significant speech of her premiership. Among sections of the speech cut out was Howe’s
suggested line: ‘A stronger Europe does not mean the creation of a new Euro super-state but does, has and will require the sacrifice of political independence and the rights of national
parliaments.’
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The Foreign Office’s ‘interference and provocation’, noted the trade minister, Alan Clark, who saw the
draft script, ‘turned a relatively minor ceremonial chore into what could now well be a milestone in redefining our position towards the Community’.
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‘Europe is not the creation of the Treaty of Rome. Nor is the European idea the property of any group or institution,’ Thatcher duly
pointed out to the dignitaries, with a hint of the unabashed effrontery that Martin Luther had brought to his audience with the Emperor Charles V. To Thatcher, it was essential to
wrest from the Commission the legitimacy to speak for the peoples of a continent. Given that the Berlin Wall remained firmly in situ, she showed foresightedness in holding up the dream not of a
deeper but a wider Europe, which looked out to the peoples artificially cut off from it by the Iron Curtain. This led on to her main complaint about ‘power . . . centralized in
Brussels’ and decisions ‘taken by an appointed bureaucracy’, since:
it is ironic that just when those countries such as the Soviet Union, which have tried to run everything from the centre, are learning that success depends on dispersing
power and decisions away from the centre, there are some in the Community who seem to want to move in the opposite direction. We have not successfully rolled back the frontiers of the state in
Britain, only to see them reimposed at a European level with a European super-state exercising a new dominance from Brussels.
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The speech galvanized both sides. Inspired by its clarion call, an Oxford undergraduate, Patrick Robertson, founded the Bruges Group in February 1989, proceeding to attract
mostly right-leaning politicians and academics including the historian Norman Stone and the philosopher Roger Scruton to the first of a new generation of Eurosceptic think tanks. But those
perturbed by the Bruges speech were not just members of the ‘appointed bureaucracy’ in Brussels. They included diplomats and leaders of other member states,
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and some of the prime minister’s colleagues. Howe was appalled at the speech’s impact, since he regarded its depiction of the Community’s ambitions
as veering ‘between caricature and misunderstanding’, leaving him to conclude in his memoirs that ‘for Margaret the Bruges speech represented, subconsciously at least, her escape
from the collective responsibility of her days in the Heath Cabinet’.
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If Thatcher was nervous about the path that Delors was paving towards a federal Europe, it was only with difficulty that she could accept that she had, even if inadvertently, provided him with
the materials to undertake his task. At the time of his appointment to Brussels in 1985 she had preferred him to the alternative candidate, another French – but less effectual –
socialist. As much as any European leader, it was Thatcher who lent crucial support to Delors’s vision of a Community enjoying within its borders the free movement of goods, services, capital
and people. This was the creation of the ‘single market’, and it represented the aspect of European integration that appeared to be not just compatible with Thatcherism but its triumph
sans frontières
. Much of the drafting to eliminate the internal barriers was done by
Thatcher’s former trade secretary, Lord Cockfield, whom she
dispatched to Brussels as commissioner for competition policy in 1984. Having removed, or being in the course of removing, regulatory restrictions within the British economy, she naturally wished
to see a level playing field for Britons, their money and their products in the European market. It was, after all, vexing for her to have to endure lectures on being a good European from
Mitterrand, who continued to barricade the French economy behind exchange controls that restricted the free flow of capital across France’s borders, when the UK had led the way in abolishing
this form of financial protectionism in 1979. The Single European Act directed that a European market without any internal restrictions would be established by 1992. Thatcher comforted herself that
this was a free trade measure in British commercial interests, which included only an ambiguous reference to economic and monetary union and no firm commitment to include harmonization of national
policies in other areas, like border controls and taxation, which she continued to regard as coming under the rightful jurisdiction of nation states. At Westminster, the legislation was passed,
with remarkably little discussion, on a three-line whip. Yet in order to disable national obstructionism, it scrapped member states’ vetoes by introducing qualified majority voting across a
swathe of regulatory matters, establishing the legal framework within which European integration could gather pace unchecked.
The route map for where this integration was leading was clearly laid out by the publication in April 1989 of the Delors report, which detailed the European Commission’s three-step
approach to economic and monetary union: stage one, the removal of the remaining capital controls between member states by 1 July 1990; stage two, the independence of central banks from their
governments and greater monetary convergence by 1 January 1994; and stage three, the replacement of national currencies with a new single currency, managed by a European Central Bank, from 1
January 1999. For Thatcher, the problem was that she was the only significant voice among Community heads of government who had doubts about stage two and was openly hostile to stage three. The
headline from each successive meeting of the European Council was that she – and therefore Britain – was isolated. Her refusal to compromise on principles made her reluctant to make
concessions on the details that underlay them. Lawson later argued that this tone ‘was foolish and threw away many opportunities to build alliances’, with the result that ‘by 1989
she had become the Community’s great unifying force’.
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Her negative tone also animated the Conservatives’ campaign for the
European Parliament elections in June 1989, in which party headquarters overruled the pro-
communitaire
beliefs of most of its MEPs by running adverts featuring a plate of sprouts and the
contrived slogan ‘Stay at home on 15 June and you’ll live on a diet of Brussels’. Gaining thirteen seats at the
expense of the Conservatives, Labour won the
election. The Tories’ performance (35 per cent of the vote against 37 per cent for Labour) was not especially poor for a mid-term government and the losses may have been primarily due to
domestic politics, not least the looming poll tax, and the customary desire to record a protest in non-Westminster elections (the Green Party won 15 per cent of the vote). Regardless, Tory
pro-European integrationists interpreted it as evidence of a popular yearning for a more positive attitude towards Brussels, even though only 36 per cent of the electorate troubled to vote.
None was more certain of this interpretation than the Foreign Secretary, Sir Geoffrey Howe. ‘The party,’ he suggested in his memoirs, ‘was effectively being split by the
defection of its own leader.’
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On 20 June, Lawson and Howe jointly went to see Thatcher in her office to impress upon her the urgency of
showing positive intent by letting sterling join the ERM. Once they had gone, she consulted her personal economics adviser, Sir Alan Walters, who drew up tough conditions as a prerequisite for
joining, including the UK’s inflation rate descending to the average inside the ERM. In the meantime, instead of consulting Lawson or Howe on the line to adopt in the coming Madrid summit of
European leaders, where the Delors report was to be discussed, she turned to her personal entourage of Alan Walters, Charles Powell, Brian Griffiths and her press secretary, Bernard Ingham. A prime
minister who no longer trusted the judgement of her Chancellor or Foreign Secretary was isolated indeed. On Sunday, 25 June, Howe and Lawson duly invited themselves to see her at Chequers just
hours before she was due to fly to Madrid. They told her that unless she agreed to set a date for entry to the ERM, they would jointly resign. The threat was met with an awkward silence – one
that continued on the flight out to Madrid, during which prime minister and Foreign Secretary addressed not a word to one another, the curtain across the gangway between them pointedly drawn
throughout the journey. When the summit got under way the following morning, Howe was still in the dark as to what policy she would announce. In the event, she did just enough to keep her Foreign
Secretary and Chancellor on board, by announcing her intention for sterling to join the ERM. But she did not set a date. A month later, on 24 July, she made a broad-ranging reshuffle of her Cabinet
and removed Howe from the Foreign Office.
Howe was not expecting this reversal of fortune, even though his six years in the post had made him the longest-serving Foreign Secretary since Sir Edward Grey (1905–16). When the prime
minister offered him the consolation of the office of either Home Secretary or Leader of the House, he went away to think about it and drafted a letter of resignation.
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The subsequent history of the Conservative Party might have been very different if he had sent it. Instead, he put it aside and asked to be Leader of the House on
condition he was also made deputy prime minister. This was an honorary position – as Thatcher’s press secretary, Bernard Ingham, undiplomatically made clear – though
Howe may have imagined it would give him the moderating influence that its last holder, Willie Whitelaw, had enjoyed. In this he was mistaken. Despite coming from different wings of the party,
Thatcher liked and admired Whitelaw. For Howe, she could no longer conceal an irritation that bordered dangerously on contempt. In his place at the Foreign Office, she installed John Major, who was
not known to be an ideologue for European integration – or, indeed, for much else, though he had impressed in his one year of Cabinet experience as Chief Secretary to the Treasury. Thatcher
complacently assumed – as she put it to Nick Ridley – that the new man was ‘one of us’.
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