Why Thatcher saw Europe as a ‘corrupt octopus’
MARGARET THATCHER considered the European Union to be “the corrupt octopus” and would probably not have backed David Cameron’s EU renegotiation, a friend says today.
Lord Pearson of Rannoch said that claims from another adviser, Lord Powell of Bayswater, that she would back Mr Cameron’s deal shows he feels “guilty for misleading her”.
Lord Powell, who as Charles Powell was Lady Thatcher’s former private secretary and foreign affairs adviser, used a Sunday Times article to say that although the so-called Iron Lady might have “raged more mightily” at Brussels than Mr Cameron, “she would have gone along with what is on offer, indeed negotiated something similar herself ”. However in a letter to The Daily Tel
egraph today, Lord Rannoch, who entertained Baroness Thatcher as a house guest, refuted the claim that she would have backed the deal to reshape Britain’s relationship with the EU ahead of a referendum. “The contention of Charles Powell, her former adviser, that Baroness Thatcher’s view would be to stay in the European Union could be because he feels guilty that he mis- led her over the Single European Act of 1986. She supported our rebellion in the Lords against the Maastricht Treaty in 1992, and by 1996, when she came to stay with me, her favourite subject was the infamy of ‘the corrupt octopus in Brussels’ and how we could escape its clutches. In her declining years it was just about the only subject which brought her to life.” Also writing in today’s Daily Tele
graph, Charles Moore, Lady Thatcher’s biographer, declined to be drawn on the claim from Lord Powell. However, he said: “The whole time she was in office, she never said that Britain should leave. Once she had left office, she said privately – to me and several others – that she thought we should.”
Lord Powell has previously said he refutes the suggestion that he misled the former prime minister in respect of the Single European Act and that she “knew exactly what she was doing when she signed up to it. She was determined to see the single market in Europe implemented, and the only way that could work would be by extending Qualified Majority Voting”.