MAGGIE Thatcher would have certainly voted for Brexit, her son declared on her 100th birthday.
Sir Mark Thatcher has scotched claims Britain’s first female PM would have been a Remainer.
Mark Thatcher interview on Harry Cole Saves the West[/caption]
Harry Cole interviews Mark Thatcher for Harry Cole Saves The West[/caption]
Mark Thatcher’s comments fly in the face of claims made by Thatcher’s long time foreign policy aide Charles Powell[/caption]
In a powerful interview to mark his mother’s centenary, Sir Mark spoke out for the first time since her death in 2013.
Asked on Harry Cole Saves the West his mum would have been a Brexiteer, he insisted: “Yes, in my estimate.”
Watch Harry Cole’s interview with Sir Mark Thatcher here on his exclusive show
Admitting the late Baroness Thatcher – as one of the chief architects of the Single Market – had a complex relationship with the EU, he said: “whilst it was an economic community, she was wholly in support of it. She became less enthusiastic when it became a political union.”
His comments fly in the face of claims made by Thatcher’s long time foreign policy aide Charles Powell, who sparked uproar during the heated 2016 Brexit referendum by claiming his old boss would have been a Remainer.
Lord Powell said at the time: “She would never have backed Brexit. She’s far too sensible for that.”
And he claimed the late PM would have backed David Cameron’s duff efforts to reform the EU, boasting she “would have gone along with what is on offer, indeed negotiated something similar herself”.
But Sir Mark hit back today: “The debate within her mind would have been, is the potential loss of economic benefits, a price that she would afford to pay in respect of recovering our sovereignty over Parliament and the management of our own political and financial affairs”.
Explaining the logic, he insisted his mother: “didn’t like large amorphous masses of government in the first place.”
“And the other thing was that she was deeply conscious of the fact that our parliament has an extraordinary history going back hundreds of years, and she firmly believed that our parliament in Westminster should be the one that actually governs the nation, and not Brussels.”
And he warned the EU seeking closer political ties was a mistake of historic proportions.
He said: “I always found it extraordinary that in time when the Soviet Union was collapsing, because it was a large, multinational, amorphous mass of a wide range of nationalities being forced together into the Soviet Union… in that in the exact moment in time when the Soviet Union was collapsing, because then that the nationalities and the countries there wanted their own representation, Europe was trying to do exactly the opposite, which was agglomerate all of the European countries together into a single amorphous mass.”
MAGGIE’S INFLUENCE
Thatcher was well-known for her radical right-wing economic policies, dubbed “Thatcherism,” and her confrontational foreign policy.
During the Cold War, Thatcher supported US President Ronald Reagan’s tough policies against the Soviets, which aimed to end the spread of Communism in Europe.
She also argued fiercely that the UK paid too much to the European Economic Community (EEC). She secured an annual rebate for the United Kingdom which lasted until the Tony Blair years.
In 1982, Argentina invaded the Falkland Islands.
Thatcher sent 8,000 soldiers to fight, and Britain’s victory in the Falkland’s War boosted her public popularity.
The issue of Northern Ireland also characterised her premiership, which came to a head when an assassination attempt was made against the Prime Minister in the Brighton hotel bombing.
Thatcher died on April 8, 2013, at the age of 87, while staying at the Ritz Hotel.
