There is No Alternative (47 page)

Thatcher won the fight, but the love affair was never the same.

It is so often that way.

Despite these conflicts, says Powell, Thatcher at this point still fundamentally believed that “Europe was on balance where Britain should be. It was OK. There were things like common fisheries policies that needed to be changed, improved, but she made this great campaign for the single market in Europe, and it was one of the great successes of Europe. It was certainly very much in our interests.” The Single European Act of 1986, a Thatcher initiative, established a European market, without frontiers, in which goods, services, people, and capital might move freely. This was, of course, consistent with the economic principles she stood for.

“What tipped her over the edge against Europe was really two things,” Powell says. “One was when they started to go to the single currency. She believed that was eroding national sovereignty to a point which was just unacceptable.” A single currency, Thatcher believed, necessarily entailed something very like a single economic policy: Britain would no longer be able to set its own interest rates or make adjustments to its exchange rates. In other words, it would no longer have access to the key economic instruments normally available to sovereign governments. Instead, these decisions would be made centrally, in the context of a huge federal European budget. To Thatcher, this idea was for obvious reasons anathema.

The second provocation came in the form of Jacques Delors, the socialist president of the EEC Commission. Delors was, in Thatcher's words, on “the federalist express.” By 1988, she writes, “he had slipped his leash as a
fonctionnaire.
” Delors in that year announced to the European Parliament that in the coming five years, the European Community would become responsible for 80 percent of all legislation: An “embryo” European government, he said, might emerge.

To Europeans who had “no real confidence in the political system or political leaders of their own country,” Thatcher later
wrote, it might be tolerable to have “foreigners” like Delors “telling you how to run your affairs.” But not to a proud Briton. “To put it more bluntly,” she sniffs, “if I were an Italian I might prefer rule from Brussels too.”
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As if this wasn't enough, Delors then pitched up in Britain to address the Trades Union Conference. “He used words to the effect that in a couple years' time all important decisions about Britain will be taken in Brussels, not here,” Powell recalls. “And that just infuriated her, politically, I mean, made her just
angry.
She just thought,
Well, now, they've really come clean on what the elite in Europe are really after. They're after the extinction of national sovereignty.
”

Delors won the trade unions over. Originally wary, their members became persuaded that the European unification project might well be a way to roll back Thatcherite reforms, particularly since the ballot box certainly wasn't doing the trick. Ron Todd, the head of the Transport and General Workers' Union, heard Delors's speech and emerged, inspired, declaring, “We have not a cat in hell's chance of achieving [our goals] in Westminster, but we may have it in Brussels.”
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The Labour Party agreed.

Thatcher remained committed to the overarching principle that anything the Labour Party wanted must be bad for Britain: If they were now for Europe, she was against it. “From then on,” recalls Powell, “she was determined to start a fight back.”

This is where the story gets ugly. Her clashes with Jacques Chirac in the European Council were, as Powell chastely puts it, “memorable.” In one of them, “He used a word about her so vulgar that all the interpreters screeched to a halt—she was totally unaware of it, not speaking any French at all. She didn't—”

“And the word was?”

Powell blushes. “I wouldn't dream of repeating it with your recorder on.”

“I'll switch it off.”

“I wouldn't say it even then. Um, but um—”

“Is there some way I can find out? Was it reported anywhere else?”

“I don't think anyone's put it in any book, no, but it's famous for being a vulgarism which would not normally be used in any sort of society, let alone what was supposed to be a polite—I mean, this is because he got very angry with her, this was about agriculture, his desire to protect the French farmers and so on—”

“And really, truly, the interpreters all screeched to a halt?”

“Yes, you could hear the brakes going on!”

“And how was the word translated in the end?”

“It wasn't. There was just sort of, you know, this embarrassed pause.”

I couldn't find anyone who would tell me what Chirac said, and I still do not know, but judging from Powell's uncomfortable squirming—he was clearly mortified just thinking of it—it must have been quite something.

Meanwhile, the obsessively regulatory character of the European project was becoming increasingly apparent. At one stage, directives on transport safety threatened to consign London's famous double-decker buses to oblivion. The commission objected to calling Cadbury bars “chocolate” because they didn't contain the regulation measure of cocoa solids. Thatcher, said Powell, “was pretty rapidly reaching the view that actually Britain should withdraw
from the European Union. Now, she never said that publicly in a speech, but she came close to it.”

On September 20, 1988, Thatcher made her infamous speech to the College of Europe at Bruges. She began with a few pleasantries, then briskly offended everyone present by reminding them of the debt they owed to Britain:

She professed her commitment to European cooperation. “I want to see us work more closely on the things we can do better together than alone.” She then defined this as a distinctly more narrow category than envisioned by Delors:

She concluded by warning against Utopian goals: “Utopia never comes,” she said. “We should not like it if it did.”
²⁵²
Subtext:
You lot have certainly got yourself in trouble every time you've tried to create Utopia, haven't you?

The Bruges speech seems eminently reasonable now, in the fullness of hindsight. It hardly appears to be an expression of fulminating xenophobia—or, for that matter, incipient madness and overweening pride. In 2000, Tony Blair returned to Belgium and allowed that many of Thatcher's concerns had been justified. But at the time her words had the effect of a thunderclap.

“The Bruges speech was really like Martin Luther nailing his theses to the church door,” says Powell. “For the first time someone set out the limits of Europe and where it should go. It accepted most of what Europe had done up to that point, but it said: ‘Thus far and no further.'” Indeed, the profoundly offended audience responded with about as much enthusiasm as the Catholic church responded to Martin Luther. “Frankly, I am shocked,” said one European commissioner. “Maybe all her speech at Bruges was intended to keep her nationalist-minded right-wingers happy while the serious business in Europe is done more discreetly,” sniffed another.
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To those who subscribed to the view—not long ago Thatcher's own—that in a unified Europe lay the solution to the long tradition of European carnage, Thatcher might as well have delivered this speech in a gas mask while calling for the immediate renewal
of hostilities on the Western Front. The Belgian prime minister indignantly replied that European unification “is not based on a utopian concept but rather on some very practical considerations: the preservation of peace and prosperity on a continent torn by fratricidal strife.”
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This view was emphatically shared by Thatcher's foreign secretary. In his memoirs, Geoffrey Howe describes Thatcher's description of a Europe ruled by an appointed bureaucracy and through endless regulation as “sheer fantasy.” Listening to the Bruges speech was, he wrote, “a little like being married to a clergyman who had suddenly proclaimed his disbelief in God.”
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To those who saw European unification as inevitable, Thatcher's intransigence seemed strategically witless: By alienating her European counterparts, they believed, she would ensure nothing but a diminished role for Britain. Neil Kinnock swiftly seized upon this point:

For a change, Kinnock found a great deal of sympathy for this view—if not for him—in the Conservative Party.

“Do you think her sentiments about Europe were at the heart of her downfall?” I ask Powell.

“No. They were part of it, but they weren't at the heart of it. They were the tactical excuse for it, unleashing Geoffrey Howe to start a process which led to a fear among many conservative MPs that the poll tax was going to prevent their re-election. And her increasingly high-handed treatment of her closest political colleagues probably cost her more votes, or combined to a much greater vote.”