The Iron Lady

erotic undercurrent in her relations with Mitterrand which predisposed her to like him. It was he who famously – and to the bewilderment of her British critics – described her as having ‘the eyes of Caligula and the mouth of Marilyn Monroe’.³ The former were undisputed, but it took a Frenchman to appreciate the latter.

Second, she quickly found that Mitterrand, though nominally a socialist, was a patriotic socialist – ‘unlike ours’, as she once tartly told Harold Evans.⁴ Ten years older than Giscard (who was slightly younger than Mrs Thatcher), Mitterrand had fought in the Resistance and was still grateful for British support in the war. When he visited London in September 1981 the Foreign Office cleverly managed to find the pilot who had flown him to England in 1940. He was as firmly committed to maintaining the French independent force de frappe as she was to the British nuclear deterrent, and thus shared her alarm at SDI and Reagan’s bilateral negotiations at Reykjavik.

Third, quite early in their relationship Mitterrand won her undying gratitude by his prompt and unequivocal support for Britain’s cause in the Falklands. Mrs Thatcher never forgot this timely assistance. For the rest of the decade there persisted a strong mutual respect between Mrs Thatcher and Mitterrand which transcended their political differences.

By contrast, she never warmed to Helmut Kohl, who succeeded Helmut Schmidt as Chancellor of West Germany in 1982. She was as glad to see the back of Schmidt as she was of Giscard; but she thought Kohl boring, clumsy and provincial and persistently underestimated him. A huge man with a dominating physical presence and an enormous appetite, he perfectly embodied her resentment of Germany’s post-war prosperity, which was never far below the surface. At first she patronised Kohl (as Schmidt and Giscard patronised her). But the longer he survived, as he grew in political stature and increasingly came to rival her as the dominant figure in Europe, the more her dislike grew. Kohl tried hard to woo her: but she would not be wooed.

She regarded every European summit as another battle in a protracted war to defend British interests against the greedy and scheming foreigners. More than this, she despised the whole ethos of compromise, deal- making and fudge, which was how the Community worked. ‘She was quite simply too straight, too direct, too principled and altogether too serious for them’, in Bernard Ingham’s view.⁵ But by disdaining to play by the Community’s prevailing rules she reduced her own effectiveness and damaged British interests.

After five years of wrangling, she finally achieved a budget settlement which satisfied her in June 1984. Up until then she continued to block all other progress in the EC – on VAT payments and reform of the Common Agricultural Policy – until she got her way. The three-year deal secured by Peter Carrington in 1981 was about to expire. In the end she settled for less than she wanted – a 66 per cent rebate, not the ‘well over 70 per cent’ which had been her goal.⁶ She also accepted an increase from 1 per cent to 1.4 per cent of each country’s VAT returns that should be payable to the Community. The critical fact was that Mitterrand wanted a settlement under the French presidency. Mrs Thatcher knew that this was her best chance, and wisely took it. The other countries were just relieved that the ‘Bloody British Question’ was resolved at last.

With the budget dispute finally settled, it certainly appeared that Britain was now ready to play a more constructive role. The rest of the Community was also ready to open a new chapter, marked by the appointment of an energetic new President of the Commission – Jacques Delors, formerly Mitterrand’s Finance Minister. With hindsight, Mrs Thatcher dismissed Delors as a typical French Socialist. But she was largely instrumental in his appointment, since she vetoed the first French candidate, Claude Cheysson. Delors had impressed the British as tough and practical: he had been responsible for scrapping most of the left-wing policies on which Mitterrand had been elected and implementing instead what Howe called ‘our policies’.⁷ Delors was indeed tough and practical, but he was also a European visionary, as she soon discovered.

Taking office in January 1985, Delors quickly fixed on the completion of the single market as the next big advance in the evolution of the Community. He looked first at other areas – common defence policy, progress towards a single currency, the reform of Community institutions – but he could not get sufficient agreement on any of these. So he settled for what he called ‘les quatre libertes’ – free movement of goods, services, capital and people. This Mrs Thatcher was happy to go along with. It seemed consistent with her idea of the Community as essentially a free-trade area – a true common market – and an opportunity for advancing Thatcherite economic ideas of deregulation and free enterprise on a European scale. Carried away with her vision of Thatcherising the Community, she did not realise that Delors – and Mitterrand and Kohl and almost all the smaller countries – saw the single market as part of a wider process of European integration.

At first, however, all went swimmingly. She appointed Arthur Cockfield as one of Britain’s two members of the new Commission. He wasted no time in publishing a detailed programme entitled Completing the Internal Market, listing 292 specific measures of deregulation to be achieved by 1992. Mrs Thatcher was delighted. This, she thought, was Britain at last leading the Community, as pro-Europeans had aspired to do ever since Macmillan first applied for membership, and extending to the overgoverned Continent the benefits of British free enterprise. But it was not so simple as that. Mrs Thatcher did not understand that creating a single market necessarily involved not just deregulation, but the harmonisation of regulations across the Community, which impinged on matters hitherto the prerogative of national governments. In her view Cockfield, in his missionary zeal for the project to which she had appointed him, betrayed her by straying too far into the forbidden area of integration. Like practically every British politician who has ever been appointed to Brussels, he ‘went native’ and adopted a quasi-federalist perspective. Though the rest of the Community regarded him as a conspicuous success, Mrs Thatcher declined to reappoint Cockfield for a second term.

In the meantime, however, in order to make progress on the single market, she realised that she would have to acquiesce in other developments which she subsequently came to regret. The so-called Single European Act – Delors’ major initiative to carry the process of European integration forward – extended the application of weighted majority voting into new areas and increased the powers of both the Commission and the Parliament. Mrs Thatcher was afraid that the completion of the single market would be held up by other countries exercising their national vetoes, and positively bullied her partners to accept majority voting in this area.

She did what she could to block what she regarded as the most utopian proposals and drove forward agreement on the practical measures required to implement the single market, believing that the wider implications of the new treaty were no more than woolly aspirations which would come to nothing. In particular she believed that she had qualified the ‘irrevocable’ commitment to economic and monetary union (EMU) originally signed up to by Heath, Brandt and Pompidou in 1972, substituting instead a reference to economic and monetary ‘co-operation’; and also that she had preserved the right of national veto in such sensitive areas as border controls, customs and drugs policy, and indeed any matter which any member country regarded as vital, under the so-called Luxembourg Compromise.

As a result of these assurances, the Single European Act was whipped through Parliament with scarcely a murmur of dissent. The Labour party was in the process of reversing its former opposition to all things European, while Tory Eurosceptics – as they were later called – believing that Mrs Thatcher shared their antipathy to any hint of federalism, trusted in her vigilance and accepted her assurances that they had nothing to worry about. In fact, whatever she and the Foreign Office believed, the Single European Act as interpreted in Brussels did very significantly extend the powers of both the Commission and the Strasbourg Parliament, and led on logically to the Treaty of Maastricht in 1992 and eventually to the single currency.

The fact is that Mrs Thatcher ‘gave away’ more sovereignty in 1985 than Heath in 1973 or Major in 1992. She subsequently claimed that she was deceived by the other leaders who broke assurances that they had given her. ‘I trusted them,’ she recalled bitterly in 1996. ‘I believed in them. I believed this was good faith between nations co-operating together. So we got our fingers burned. Once you’ve got your fingers burned, you don’t go and burn them again.’⁸ But the idea that Mrs Thatcher, of all people, did not read the Act closely before signing it is incredible to anyone who knew her. David Williamson, Secretary-General of the Community from 1987, recalled her telling him specifically, ‘I have read every word of the Single European Act.’⁹ So why did she sign it? Bernard Ingham thought she knew what she was doing: ‘I think she knew at the time that she was taking risks… She was taking a calculated risk with a very clear view in mind.’¹⁰ In other words, she believed that the substantial bird in the hand was worth a flock of shadows in the bush. Delors confirms this interpretation, recalling that she hesitated and asked for an extra few minutes to think about it before she signed.¹¹

As usual, she blames others, but has only herself to blame. Blinded by the strength of her own conviction, she did not understand the equal strength of the other leaders’ will to maintain the momentum of economic,