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
protégé, 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 about the sort
of battles Britain would have to wage to defend her prerogatives. At
his insistence, the accession document of 1972 contained specific
language on this question.

This typically British approach was Thatcher's initial position.
Indeed, she may have been somewhat more pro-Europe than average. From
her first days in Parliament, she was a member of the European Union
of Women, a pro-Europe advocacy group. She has recorded in her Road
to Power that she was "wholeheartedly in favor of Britain's entry
into the Common Market." In common with all her contemporaries, her
reasoning revolved around trade and economics. This allowed her, as a
member of Heath's cabinet at the time of the accession negotiations,
to disregard Enoch Powell's warnings about potential European
encroachment on British sovereignty as merely "technical." Later this
same reasoning prompted her to go forward with the 1985 Single
European Act that laid the foundation for the modern EU.

Had she stayed with this reasoning all might have been well. Her
critics, even those like Geoffrey Howe and Douglas Hurd who are most
contemptuous of her boorish antics, have conceded that many of her
positions made sense. Her dogged demands in 1979-84 for a reduction
in Britain's budgetary payments to Europe, for example, brought home
to her European colleagues that centralized overspending could not
continue. Her emphasis on local responsibility established the
now-sacrosanct principle of "subsidiarity" in the European
decision-making process, whereby decisions are devolved down to the
lowest possible level.

These accomplishments were considerable. But they were not enough for
Thatcher. Deriving a sense of Anglo-Saxon superiority from her
redoubtable Falklands victory, she began to wallow in the sentiment
that the European structures were "quintessentially UN-English."
(Whether this also means UN-Welsh, UN-Scots, and UN-Irish will
necessarily be left to the imagination, for unfortunately there are
now no Conservative Members of Parliament from these countries to
enlighten us.)

The sentiment that, in terms of culture, the EU was irredeemably
alien led Thatcher into dangerous waters. Not only did it convince
her that saying "No, No, No" amounted to a sufficient European
policy, but it also pushed her off her original (mainstream) position
of defending British interests from within the EU. This was the
position she had advanced with considerable tactical finesse at the
1988 Brussels European Council, where she traded concessions on
structural funds in return for a long-term guarantee of Britain's
budgetary rebate.

She now deserted that position. In her heart she began to question
the very principles on which the EU was based. "Were British
democracy and our traditional sense of fairness", she records herself
as asking, "to be subordinated to the demands of a remote European
bureaucracy resting on very different traditions?" She began to act
as though she were the first person to discover that there was a
potential conflict between British EU membership and British
sovereignty.