History of England 1-6

But her regime was as liberal as any before or since; she was a lifelong foe of tyranny; she placed herself in the firing line whenever one existed; she was democratically elected three times; and she gave succour to the impulse for freedom whenever she thought it had a chance of life. The charge that she was a ‘Little Englander’ was harder to refute, though in truth she was more of a ‘Big Englander’; she did not understand the aspirations of Wales or Scotland, and tended to construe Great Britain as no more than a greater England.

But whether a ‘little’ or ‘big’ Englander, Thatcher was hard to perceive as a European. This was not through want of effort on her part. She had been an enthusiastic supporter of the Common Market and a leading participant in the negotiations that led to the Single European Act. It may be that landslide of 1987 had lent Thatcher a new sense of confidence that rendered impregnable her notion of Britain leading Europe by its example of capitalist revolution. It was her misfortune to have as antagonist a man whose understanding of the European Community, and Britain’s role in it, was quite different.

Jacques Delors had been appointed president of the Commission in part owing to Thatcher’s good offices. In her eyes, he was vastly preferable to the alternative candidate, a socialist; Delors respected Thatcher as a ‘rich and complex character’, who had done much to accelerate the progress of the Single Market. In the aftermath of the Single European Act of 1985, a largely British achievement, they had worked well together; yet few political honeymoons have proved quite so tempestuous or indeed ephemeral. Delors, like de Gaulle before him, found it hard to distinguish between the interests of France and those of the European Community. Moreover, the brash new anglophone world forged by Reagan and Thatcher was little to his taste. And for all his energy and apparent modernity, Delors seemed the denizen of an older world, one in which France ruled the conference table just as Britain ruled the waves. On one occasion, when asked why he refused to speak in English, Delors retorted: ‘Parce que le Français c’est la langue de la diplomatie … ’ (Because French is the language of diplomacy). And in a growling undertone, he added: ‘et de la civilization!’ (and of civilization).

Between two such mastiffs, each convinced of the justice of their cause, a clash was inevitable. On 6 July 1988, Delors delivered a speech in which he predicted that 80 per cent of the Community’s economy and much of its social and political policy would be determined at European rather than national level. He added, two weeks later, that the ‘germ’ of a European government was now laid. These statements alone would have been enough to irritate and even dismay the British prime minister, but Delors then committed a more serious offence. On 8 September, he took his case for federalism to the British TUC.

Under Michael Foot, the Labour party had been almost implacably hostile to Britain’s membership of the EEC. The European project was a capitalist cartel that had compromised Britain’s sovereignty and would render nearly impossible the implementation of a truly socialist programme in Britain. By 1987, with the more pragmatic Neil Kinnock as leader, the party had softened its stance. Speaking quietly, Delors appeared to promise the unions a restoration of the rights they had assumed in the Seventies. ‘Dear friends,’ he said in valediction. ‘We need you.’ Almost to a member, the congress rose in enraptured applause. It says much for his powers of persuasion that even Michael Foot, seeing his beloved unions wooed, now began to support the EEC.

Not only had Delors placed himself in the vanguard of a vision that Thatcher could never accept, he was now appealing to her oldest and greatest enemies in its defence. An opportunity to make her feelings known came quickly when, in September 1988, she was invited to address the College of Europe in Bruges. Her speech began innocuously enough, as she hastened to root Britain firmly within Europe, its traditions and values. Then the tone changed: ‘But we British have in a special way contributed to Europe. Over the centuries we have fought to prevent Europe from falling under the dominance of a single power. We have fought and we have died for her freedom … Had it not been for that willingness to fight and to die, Europe would have been united long before now – but not in liberty, not in justice.’