The Path to Power

The Downing Street Years, pp. 17-19.

63

I have described the arguments about Europe, which formed the background to my stepping down as Prime Minister, in The Downing Street Years.

64

See The Downing Street Years, pp. 724-46.

65

See The Downing Street Years, pp. 90-1.

66

The Downing Street Years, p. 723.

67

The Plaza Agreement (March 1985) was an attempt by international finance ministers and central bank governors to bring down the value of the dollar. The markets proved all too obliging. The Louvre Agreement (February 1987) was concluded in the hope of checking the dollar’s fall and bringing about a wider stabilization of currencies — paving the way for Nigel Lawson’s shadowing of the Deutschmark, which began the following month.

68

In saying this I was bending over backwards to be obliging to the Government, which in fact was unnecessarily worsening the recession by a monetary overkill resulting from an obsession with the exchange rate.

69

Speech to the Bertelsmann Foundation, 3 April 1992.

70

See The Downing Street Years, pp. 724-5.

71

For the full text of the speech see Appendix 1, pp. 609-25.

72

The Schengen Treaty has been signed and implemented by nine members of the European Union, providing for the removal of border controls between participating states.

73

Quoted in Mark Almond, Europe’s Backyard War (London, 1994), p. 32.

74

My concern with this wording led to my having it glossed with the phrase ‘cooperation in economic and monetary policy’ in the text of the Single European Act.

75

Noel Malcolm, Sense on Sovereignty (Centre for Policy Studies, November 1991), p. 10: ‘The central fault is that they fail to make any distinction between power and authority. That distinction is the basis of all legal understanding: if you do not have the concept of authority as something different from mere power, then you cannot have the concept of law as anything other than the mere application of force.’

76

Patrick Messerlin, ‘Why such Blindness? European Union Trade Policy at the Crossroads’, in Trade Policy Review (Centre for Policy Studies, September 1994) p. 46.