What would former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher do? All political movements, however secular, have their pantheon of deities, saints and inspirational figures. In the modern Conservative party, Thatcher is still the magnetic north, against whom all subsequent Tory leaders have positioned themselves.
Which is why the Conservative party is ablaze with argument over Lord Powell’s striking claim in Sunday Times: That the Iron Lady would have opted for renegotiation of Britain’smembership of the EU “for something very close to what is on offer now”.
Powell, Thatcher’s closest adviser for many years, concludes that her “heart was never in our membership of the European Union (EU), but I am convinced her head would continue to favour staying in on the conditions now on offer”.
It is certainly true, as has been disclosed by her official biographer, Charles Moore, that she was drawn to the case for Britain leaving the EU during the 1990s. She hinted as much in her 2003 book, Statecraft: “It is frequently said to be unthinkable that Britain should leave the European Union. But the avoidance of thought about this is a poor substitute for judgment,” she wrote. I heard her argue that Britain would probably be better out of the EU on two separate occasions.
What she would make of Cameron’s specific strategy and the provisional deal he has struck with Donald Tusk, President of the EU Council, is a matter of speculation, of course, based on extrapolation from positions she took in different circumstances. That won’t stop Tories on either side of the great European debate arguing furiously about Powell’s intervention.
Already, Norman Tebbit has dismissed it as the conjecture of an “apparatchik”. Ouch. But, for what it’s worth, I suspect Powell is right. Out of office, Thatcher was no longer bound by the practicalities of day-to-day governance — free, in private at least, to give her instincts, exasperations and ideology free rein. Yet, in her 11 years in No 10, she was much more of a pragmatist than some of her latter-day apostles are inclined to remember.
In 1981, she yielded to the miners — recognising that her government was not yet ready for the full-blown battle that came in 1984. She was an architect of the Anglo-Irish agreement — the first step to power-sharing — and the Single European Act (1986), which significantly advanced the single market and also entrenched qualified majority voting in the EU’s lawmaking. The Gloriana of memory might have cried, “Out! Out! Out!”
But the real Thatcher (I think) would have gritted her teeth and accepted the case to stay. If nothing else, Powell’s article has given the Remainers a break after a week of mostly ghastly headlines. According to one board member of the umbrella organisation, Britain Stronger in Europe, “It has been like being in the Labour party in the final week before a general election in the 1980s”.
The focus of Downing Street’s anxieties has now shifted from Theresa May and Boris Johnson to Michael Gove, the justice secretary and a key figure in the Cameron circle — social and official — since its inception. Gove is closer still to George Osborne. He behaved with great loyalty when Cameron removed him from the Department for Education for shabbily “electoral” reasons. But he is also a politician of great intellectual integrity, admired by MPs across the spectrum, and is not impressed by the Tusk deal or the arguments for signing up to it. Gove knows Cameron will be furious if he deserts him at this of all moments, and has promised an answer by the end of the EU summit, which opens on February 18. I have heard the justice secretary’s predicament being compared to EM Forster’s famous maxim that, given a choice between betraying his friend or country, “I hope I should have the guts to betray my country”. Gove himself prefers to invoke Conan Doyle, telling allies that the conundrum is “worse than a three-pipe problem”.
While he tamps pensively, the ‘in’ campaign’s focus groups show that jargon such as “emergency brake” and “red flag” sails over the public’s collective head. The battle, indeed, will be to make voters aware that there is a battle, that the stakes are vertiginously high — and to nationalise an argument which, to date, has been almost entirely confined to the Westminster village.
Thus, the engine of the ground battle is grinding into action. Last Friday the Conservative MP and Britain Stronger in Europe board member Damian Green launched the south-east ‘in’ campaign. Yesterday, Nick Herbert, a former Home Office minister and chair of the new grouping Conservatives for Reform in Europe, was scheduled to deliver a speech attacking the ‘out’ campaigns for their failure to offer a clear vision of life after Brexit.
This is indeed the biggest problem faced by the leave camp’s fractious leaders: that they are, in Herbert’s words, “inviting the public to take a giant leap into the dark, gambling Britain’s economic success on an alternative which they can’t begin to spell out”. If the out camp is to prevail in the referendum — a vote that will probably be held fewer than 140 days hence — they must rebut this charge convincingly and comprehensively.
Johnson once said: “My policy on cake is pro having it and pro eating it.”
My hunch is that this is essentially where the bulk of British voters settle on the European question. They reserve the right to complain about continental perfidy, but have no intrinsic yearning to commit Britain to the upheaval that Brexit would unquestionably involve.
As Powell observes in a less controversial passage of his article, the Tusk deal should be presented as only the latest of “cumulative changes” that “bring us about as close to being a semi-detached member of the club as it is possible to get, while still enjoying many of its benefits”. In other words: Having the Euro-cake and eating it.
I doubt that a hypothetical argument about Thatcher will sway many votes. But her erstwhile confidant has provided the campaign with a useful parable about the limits of political theatre, the realities of government and the difference between head and heart.
And let’s be honest. As the cliff’s edge draws closer, as the dice begins to tumble, we need all the advice we can get. — Guardian News & Media Ltd
Matthew d’Ancona is a visiting research fellow at Queen Mary University of London and author of several books, including In It Together: The Inside Story of the Coalition.
