The Iron Lady

dreams’.¹¹ But for twenty years Labour’s hostility had been a major factor in keeping Mrs Thatcher positive towards Europe: the moment Labour began to reverse itself, she immediately felt free to do the same.

In fact Mrs Thatcher’s Bruges speech as eventually delivered contained a good deal that was positive, including the assertion that ‘Our destiny is in Europe, as part of the Community.’ But Britain, she insisted, had its own view of that future. ‘Europe is not the creation of the Treaty of Rome…The European Community is one manifestation of that European identity, but it is not the only one.’ She went on to set out five ‘guiding principles’, of which the most important was the first: the best way to build a successful Community was not through closer integration but through ‘willing and active co-operation between independent sovereign states’. Of course, she conceded, Europe should ‘try to speak with a single voice’ and ‘work more closely on the things we can do better together than alone’. But then came the two killer sentences:

But working closely together does not require power to be centralised in Brussels or decisions to be taken by an appointed bureaucracy… We have not successfully rolled back the frontiers of the State in Britain, only to see them re-imposed at a European level with a European superstate exercising a new dominance from Brussels.

This was the key passage. She went on to set four more guiding principles: that solutions should be practical, not utopian; that Europe should be committed to enterprise and open markets; that it should not be protectionist; and that it should maintain its commitment to NATO.¹² But most of the controversy the speech aroused centred on her first point.

It was not so much the content, but the highly charged language which ruffled feathers. It seems commonplace today, but in 1988 no one had spoken of a European ‘superstate’ before. Talk of a ‘European conglomerate’ with bureaucrats exercising ‘dominance from Brussels’ was – in the words of Michael Butler, until 1986 Britain’s permanent representative in Brussels – ‘very dangerous stuff indeed’.¹³ Mrs Thatcher’s dichotomy between a free-trade area (good) and a superstate (bad) was false, in Butler’s view, since the Community had already developed far beyond the one, and no one wanted the other. By signing the Single European Act Mrs Thatcher herself had already agreed to everything that was now on the table.¹⁴

It was not in fact what she said at Bruges but the way the speech was ‘spun’ by Bernard Ingham which ensured that it haunted the Tory party for years to come. ‘In fact,’ Lawson admitted, ‘it said a number of things that needed to be said, in a perfectly reasonable manner… But the newspaper reports, which reflected the gloss Bernard Ingham had given when briefing the press… were very different in tone and truer to her own feelings: intensely chauvinistic and… hostile to the Community.’¹⁵

Mrs Thatcher herself was delighted with the effect of the speech, and repeated its central message in even less diplomatic language at the Tory Party Conference a few weeks later. She was convinced that she had struck a popular chord, she told The Times, because federalism was ‘against the grain of our people’.¹⁶ To keep her up to the mark a number of prominent Eurosceptics formed a pressure group to campaign against ceding any further powers to the Community. The Bruges Group was mainly composed of leading Thatcherite academics – the sort of people who had provided much of the intellectual excitement of early Thatcherism but now merely purveyed an increasingly strident nationalism.

The problem with the Bruges speech was that it did not represent a policy. It was, rather, as Nye Bevan described unilateral nuclear disarmament in 1957, ‘an emotional spasm’.¹⁷ Its impact on the development of the Community was minimal; while its effect on the Conservative party over the next decade was almost wholly disastrous. In the short term, it split the party, releasing in the grass roots a vein of suppressed hostility to the Community which had been building up for years and now burst out unchecked with the leader’s undisguised approval, while at the same time infuriating most of the Cabinet and the party hierarchy whose lifelong commitment to Britain’s role in Europe as pursued by Macmillan and Heath was undiminished.The Prime Minister’s abrupt reversal of the party’s established attitude to Europe led inexorably to Geoffrey Howe’s resignation from the Government just over two years later and to the parliamentary party’s withdrawal of support which forced her own downfall in November 1990.

The ‘ambush’ before Madrid

Delors unveiled his programme in April 1989, in two parts: one his three-stage timetable for economic and monetary union, the other the so-called ‘Social Charter’. Mrs Thatcher immediately rejected both documents out of hand. The first, she told the Commons, ‘is aimed at a federal Europe, a common currency and a common economic policy which would take economic policies, including fiscal policy, out of the hands of the House, and that is completely unacceptable’.¹⁸ The second was ‘more like a Socialist charter of unnecessary controls and regulations which would… make industry uncompetitive and… increase unemployment and mean that we could not compete with the rest of the world for the trade that we so sorely need’.¹⁹ Outright opposition to both initiatives formed the basis of her platform for the elections to the European Parliament on 15 June.

Since the introduction of direct elections in 1979 the Tories had always won these five-yearly polls quite easily. They were, after all, the pro-European party. June 1989, however, found the Conservatives not only beset by rising inflation and the poll tax, but in disarray over Europe too. Mrs Thatcher authorised a manifesto, and a campaign, at odds with the views of most of her candidates, who were almost by definition Europhiles. The tone was set by a disastrously negative poster, displayed on hoardings all round the country, showing a pile of vegetables with the slogan: ‘Stay at home on 15 June and you’ll live on a diet of Brussels.’²⁰ In campaign speeches and television interviews she cast herself as Battling Maggie fighting off the foreign foe.

The result was the Tories’ first defeat in a national election under Mrs Thatcher’s leadership. On a significantly increased poll, up from 32 to 37 per cent, the party gained only 33 per cent of the vote – its lowest- ever share – and lost thirteen seats to Labour, precisely reversing the 1984 result so that Labour now held forty- two to the Tories’ thirty-five. Of course the outcome owed less to enthusiasm for a federal Europe than to the Government’s growing unpopularity for other reasons nearer home. Nevertheless the result delivered a sharp warning to Tory MPs that Neil Kinnock’s Labour party had finally become electable again, while the Prime Minister was becoming a liability whom they might need to jettison before the next election if they wanted to save their seats.

The next week the simmering tension between Mrs Thatcher and her senior colleagues came to a head in the run-up to the European Council in Madrid, when she persisted in trying to exclude her Chancellor and Foreign Secretary from any consultation about the decisions that might be taken at the summit. In public she continued to insist that there was no disagreement between them about the ERM. That might have been strictly true insofar as neither Howe nor Lawson thought it practical to join immediately; but they were both convinced that it would strengthen Britain’s hand in forthcoming negotiations about EMU if she would come off the fence at Madrid and give a commitment to join within a set timescale. She was more determined than ever to do no such thing. She prepared for the summit by convening a conference of her private advisers with no elected colleagues present at all.

On Wednesday 14 June Howe and Lawson sent her a joint minute setting out their advice that she should give a ‘non-legally binding’ undertaking at Madrid to join the ERM by the end of 1992, and asked her for a meeting.²¹ She was furious – she describes their request in her memoirs as an attempt to ‘ambush’ her – but grudgingly agreed to see them the following Tuesday, 20 June, when she bluntly rejected their arguments and refused to tie her hands. A few hours later she sent Howe a paper adding further conditions before Britain could contemplate joining, including the final completion of the single market, which might take years. Their response was to ask for another meeting. She was angrier than ever, tried to talk to the two of them separately by telephone but eventually agreed to see them together at Chequers early on Sunday morning, just before she left for Madrid. There is not much disagreement between the three of them about what happened at this ‘nasty little meeting’, as she called it. In her view they tried to ‘blackmail’ her by threatening to resign if she would not agree to state her ‘firm intention’ to join the ERM not later than a specified date. ‘They said that if I did this I would stop