Fury at claim Maggie would back EU deal
CAMPAIGNERS for Britain to stay in the European Union were accused of desperation last night after a former senior aide to Margaret Thatcher said the late Tory Prime Minister would have backed David Cameron’s deal with Brussels.
Eurosceptics reacted with fury to the claim by Charles Powell, who was Lady Thatcher’s private secretary during much of her time in Downing Street, that she would have renegotiated with Europe in much the same way as Mr Cameron.
Former close allies of Lady Thatcher, who died in April 2013, dismissed the claims made by Lord Powell in the Sunday Times that she ‘might have raged more mightily at Brussels’ but would have ‘gone along with what is on offer’.
Tory MP John Redwood, who was Lady Thatch- er’s chief policy adviser in the mid-1980s, said: ‘It must be a new low for the stay in campaign when they turn to the dead to support them.
‘May Margaret Thatcher rest in peace. She was in her political prime 30 years ago, before the treaties of Nice, Amsterdam and Lisbon transformed a relationship based on trade and business into much more of a common government. I was her chief policy adviser in her middle years and would not presume to attribute views to her about current political issues.
‘I find it disappointing that Lord Powell should presume to be able to communicate with the dead and tell us what they are thinking.’
Sir Bernard Ingham, who served as Lady Thatcher’s press secretary for 11 years until 1990, said the intervention by Lord Powell, a former diplomat, smacked of ‘desperation’.
He added: ‘He has been recaptured by the [Foreign Office]. The Establishment has got the wind up and quite rightly too. I see no evidence for his claim. Nobody knows what she would have done ten years after she suffered from a terrible loss of memory.’
Sir Bernard said that Lord Powell’s reference to Lady Thatcher leading the Yes vote in the 1975 referendum on whether Britain should stay in the European Economic Community, as it was then, was irrelevant as the present-day EU was a very different institution from 40 years ago.
Lord Tebbit, who served in Lady Thatcher’s Cabinets f rom 1981 to 1987, said of the comments: ‘It’s more than presumptuous. I think he has just simply made it up.’