Community. Mrs Thatcher blamed the unelected bureaucrat Delors for exceeding his powers; but Delors was only pursuing a course set by Francois Mitterrand and Helmut Kohl and supported by all the other elected leaders.
She made a point of treating Delors as a mere official. By 1988, however, she believed that Delors had ‘slipped his leash as a
She had to believe that Delors was behaving improperly in order to argue that he was taking the Community into new areas of integration which Britain had not signed up for when it joined the Common Market. But the goal of economic and monetary union had been set in 1972 and it had been explicitly reaffirmed in the Single European Act which she had signed in 1986. Mrs Thatcher insisted that it did not necessarily entail a single currency or a single central bank, institutions which would involve an unacceptable pooling of national sovereignty. Her difficulty was that this was exactly what all the other members did think it meant. Her need to demonise Delors derived partly from her knowledge that she had been slow to grasp what she now perceived as a mortal threat to Britain’s interest: on the contrary she had actually welcomed and promoted the Act from which the mandate to press on to economic union was derived. She now insisted that she had been tricked. She could not see, because she did not want to see, that movement towards economic and monetary union was, as John Major wrote in his memoirs, ‘the logical extension of the changes she had set in train’.3
In resisting what she conceived as a mortal threat to Britain’s historic identity – symbolised by the sanctity of sterling – Mrs Thatcher found the great cause of her last years in office, and of her retirement. Here was an external enemy, more threatening by far than a distant South American dictator, whose defeat required the Iron Lady once again to don the armour of Churchillian defiance. In opposing the insidious spectre of rule by Belgian bureaucrats and German bankers, while insisting that Britain’s true interest lay with the United States – ‘the new Europe across the Atlantic’4 – she believed that she was indeed emulating her hero, not only the defiant British bulldog of 1940 but the half-American chronicler of ‘the English-speaking peoples’. But her identification with ‘Winston’ was self-deluding: Churchill was not the simple cartoon patriot that she imagined. Not only did he issue a number of resounding (if vague) statements in support of European unity between 1945 and 1951, but in private letters, even before the end of the war, he had frequently voiced an emotional identity with Europe which was quite alien to Mrs Thatcher’s overriding deference to the United States.
Europe was her greatest blind spot. She knew and reluctantly accepted that Britain was irreversibly a member of the Community: but in her heart she wished it was not so. She had no respect for European politicians of any stripe. She veered between denouncing federalist ambitions as a mortal threat to Britain’s sovereignty and dismissing them as fantasy that would never happen. As a result she never engaged seriously with what Britain’s role in the evolving Community should be. On other subjects, from Russia to global warming, she set out to inform herself, listened to advice and devised a coherent diplomatic strategy which she then adhered to. On the subject of Europe, however – the central problem of British foreign policy – there were, as her policy adviser Percy Cradock wrote, ‘no large strategic discussions; no seminars’.5 She knew what she thought, and she knew what the rest of the Community ought to think, too, if they knew what was good for them. Consequently she was always two steps behind events, unable to lead or even to participate fully, but only to react angrily to what others proposed.
Of course she had a case. She was entitled to point out – as she did repeatedly – that Britain was ‘way ahead’ of other countries in implementing the provisions necessary to allow a single market – let alone a single currency – to function properly: the abolition of exchange controls (which Britain had ended in 1979), free capital movements and the dismantling of a host of protectionist barriers. She was constantly complaining that the French were still blocking the import of Nissan cars manufactured in Britain, or imposing unfair duties on Scotch whisky;6 and she believed they should honour what was already agreed before they went on to grander schemes. She believed in small practical steps, an incremental approach, rather than grand schemes. This she thought was the British way, and therefore by definition the better way. But the truculent manner in which she told them so only irritated her partners and alienated potential allies. The merits of her argument for a Europe of independent nations were smothered by the self-righteousness of her performance.
Moreover, she saw divisions over Europe as a threat to her authority at home. With only two reliable allies in the Cabinet – Ridley and Parkinson – and flanked by a Chancellor and Foreign Secretary who both, for different reasons, wanted to join the ERM as soon as possible, she became obsessed with the idea that Lawson and Howe were ‘in cahoots’ against her and must be kept from ganging up on her if her will was to prevail. In fact Howe and Lawson had scarcely any contact with each other. Their attitudes to the ERM were entirely distinct. Since going to the Foreign Office, Howe had become a convert to the full EMU package, including the single currency, and wanted to join the ERM as soon as possible in order to maintain Britain’s standing as a leading member of the Community. Lawson, by contrast, was as strongly opposed to the single currency as Mrs Thatcher herself. He wanted to join the ERM primarily as a monetary discipline; but he also thought that being inside the ERM would give Britain greater leverage to
At Hanover in June 1988 Mrs Thatcher set out to block the establishment of a European Central Bank; but as so often she was outmanoeuvred. Chancellor Kohl persuaded her to agree to a committee mainly composed of central bankers – including her own appointee, the Governor of the Bank of England – to study the question; then they slipped in Delors to chair it. Still she convinced herself that the creation of a central bank was not within the committee’s terms of reference. Lawson was amazed at her naivety. ‘Prime Minister,’ he claims to have told her, ‘there is no way that a committee with those terms of reference can possibly do anything else than recommend the setting up of a European Central Bank.’7 Charles Powell confirms that the committee, once set up, ‘put on an unexpected turn of speed’ and within nine months came up with the three-stage timetable for EMU which was to be the next great bone of contention between Mrs Thatcher and the rest of the Community.8 If she had been seriously engaged with the issue, she should have fought it from within. On the contrary, either she still thought it would never happen or she believed that she could veto it later.
Another example of her deafness to what she did not want to hear was her choice of Leon Brittan to replace Arthur Cockfield as Britain’s senior commissioner in Brussels. She refused to reappoint Cockfield because she thought he had ‘gone native’, and persuaded herself that Brittan, because he had been dry on economic policy at the Treasury and tough on policing as Home Secretary, would naturally be sound on Europe as well. She should have known that he was solidly pro-European and had long supported joining the ERM. But she was so anxious to push him out of domestic politics into a suitably prestigious job, to get out of her promise to bring him back into the Cabinet, that she overlooked his record – and then felt betrayed when he too ‘went native’.9
The turning point in Mrs Thatcher’s public attitude to the Community was her speech to the College of Europe in Bruges in September 1988. She had been booked to speak there, ironically, by the Foreign Office, which hoped it would provide a suitable occasion for a ‘positive’ speech on Europe. By the time she came to deliver it, however, two more developments had determined her to use it as an opportunity to slap down Jacques Delors. First, in a speech to the European Parliament in July, Delors had deliberately trailed his coat by suggesting that ‘an embryo European government’ should be established within six years and that in ten years ‘80 per cent of laws affecting the economy and social policy would be passed at a European and not a national level’.10
Then Delors compounded his offence by bringing his federalist pretensions into the British political arena. Again it was the Foreign Office which thought it might be helpful to have him address the TUC at Bournemouth. Delors gave what he regarded as a fairly standard speech, expounding the vision of harmonised laws on hours of work, working conditions and collective bargaining which the following year became the European Social Charter. But he succeeded in converting the traditionally anti-European British trade unionists almost overnight to the realisation that Europe could offer a way of regaining some of the ground they had lost during ten years of Thatcherism – which of course was exactly what Mrs Thatcher objected to. If the Foreign Office had hoped to soften Labour hostility to the Community, they succeeded, as Lawson put it, ‘beyond their wildest
