The Tory debacle: is Thatcher to blame?

• Author: Clarke, Jonathan
• Position: Conservative Party's defeat in UK May 1997 election; former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher

The devastating rebuff administered to the Conservative Party by British voters in May of this year came as no surprise. The party was tired, publicly split on policy, and scandal-ridden. The voters did the party a favor by granting it respite from the rigors of office. But where does it go from here?

Ten years ago Lord Carrington wrote in his memoirs of the advantages of his time in Australia as governor-general in lending perspective to his assessment of Britain's true interests. Physical distance allowed him to see the wood from the trees. His insight can be used today in analyzing where the Conservatives went wrong. For the future health of the conservative cause in Britain, it is important that the party use its downtime well. It must get its post-mortem right.

Viewed from across the Atlantic, there is no mystery about how the Conservative Party was brought to its knees. This feat was accomplished by a leader who foisted upon it an untenable, crassly inconsistent policy based on a mixture of arrogance, ignorance, self-indulgence, and self-deception. The leader was Margaret Thatcher. The policy was Euro-rejectionism. The Conservatives have rid themselves of the former, but the latter lives on in the parliamentary party. In rejecting as its new leader former Chancellor of the Exchequer Kenneth Clarke in favor of William Hague, a Thatcher protege, the party has shown that it is now dominated by those who believe that the only significant events in European history are the battles of Agincourt, Trafalgar, and Waterloo. This is not an electable party. If it is to regain the voters' confidence, it must purge itself of Thatcher's Euro-rejectionist incubus.

This thesis may require a little elaboration, but in fact the argument is straightforward. Compare the following quotations:

We must create the genuine common market in goods and services which is envisaged in the Treaty of Rome and will be crucial to our ability to meet the U.S. and Japanese technological challenge.

We have not successfully rolled back the frontiers of the state in Britain only to see them re-imposed at the European level with a European superstate exercising a new dominance from Brussels.

The second is well known. Taken from the then-Prime Minister Thatcher's famous October 1988 speech to the College of Europe in Bruges, this represents her at the flood tide of her anti-federalist Euro-rejectionism. It is quoted with relish in her autobiography The Downing Street Years to illustrate her point that, in her own delicate phraseology, "I had had as much of the European 'ideal' as I could take."

The authorship of the first quotation seems more problematic. Its communautaire orthodoxy is reminiscent of an arch-federalist Brussels-based fonctionnaire who has "slipped his leash" (this phrase too belongs to Thatcher, used in reference to Jacques Delors, then-president of the European Commission), and who is scheming to foist his Napoleonic centralism on the unsuspecting Anglo-Saxons. But not so. Once again the speaker is Margaret Thatcher, on this occasion at the Fontainebleau European Summit of June 1984. She adopted this stance to show her European credentials, following the bruising decade-long debate about British financial contributions to Europe. In doing so, she launched the integrationist process that led to the Single European Act of 1985 and, by easily foreseeable extension, to the Maastricht Treaty of 1992 and to European Monetary Union.

Unsurprisingly, the 1984 speech receives no mention in Lady Thatcher's writings - or in those of her hagiographers. And when history confronts her with inconvenient facts, such as her first House of Commons speech as Tory leader in 1975 in which she robustly defended British EU membership, or her campaign in the same year for a positive vote on Harold Wilson's referendum over whether Britain should continue in Europe, she makes light of them by saying that these were Edward Heath's legacy.

To have admitted these facts would, of course, have exposed the fatal implausibility underlying Thatcher's European policy: namely that, rather than having to make the best of the relationship with Europe, Britain's leaders enjoyed the option of pursuing a non-EU-based alternative choice. As a rational person, Thatcher knew that this was the stuff of dreams and carefully avoided explicitly suggesting that Britain should leave Europe. However, anyone who saw her stiffen with misty pride whenever Old Glory was on display understood that, had it been available, Thatcher would have jumped at some kind of condominium pact with what she quaintly called the "new Europe across the Atlantic."

The manifest unworkability of this vision destroyed British influence in Europe. For the nation, the fruit was bitter: either British defeat or British opt-out. For the Prime Minister personally, the consequence was to strip away the aura of the Falklands victory and "Iron Lady" invincibility and to reveal her, in Geoffrey Howe's 1990 image, as a captain deliberately sabotaging her own team. When her own credibility was destroyed, so was that of the Conservative Party.

This foreign policy blunder was bad enough. But the fact that after her 1990 dismissal as party leader she waded ever more deeply into it compounded the problem. Where she should have helped John Major pursue hard-nosed calculation about how best to defend Britain's national interests in Europe, she indulged in romantic mythologizing about keeping the down-to-earth values of the Glorious Revolution safe from the utopian dreams of Europe's Jacobin intellectuals.

This clap-trap had two disastrous results. First, it opened a fissure in the Tory party so deep that in 1997 cabinet members were openly attacking each other on the hustings. Secondly, it destroyed public confidence in the Tories' ability to handle Britain's central foreign policy task. Torn apart by Thatcher's European folly, the Tories encountered a defeat that may deprive them of office for a generation.

The absurd part of this Euro-bashing myth is that it was wholly meretricious and self-serving. It was designed (and is maintained today) to disguise the fact that - apart from the anti-EU extremism of her latter years as prime minister and in retirement - Thatcher occupied a respectable place in the mainstream of British leadership opinion about Europe. Specifically, her outlook differed little from that of Harold Macmillan or Harold Wilson. Neither of these earlier prime ministers warmed to the idea of Europe. Macmillan in particular scorned the Six's first faltering steps. But both were converted to British membership through lack of an alternative, and both knew that, once in, Britain would often have to fight for her rights. Even Heath, by far the most pro-Europe of the Conservative prime ministers who negotiated Britain's accession, had no illusions...