Maastricht - The Prime Essential: Removing Margaret Thatcher

The history of what was to become the Euro common currency, now signified by this debased sign €,  as told by the EU itself, linked here, provides useful clues as to how the first absolutely essential requirement, namely the removal of Margaret Thatcher as Prime Minister of Britain, came to be gradually perceived and accepted. This first dark act was to lead to many others in the long and sordid story of how the single currency has today brought Europe to its economic knees.

Thatcher in her own memoirs "The Downing Street Years" (Harper Collins page 759) describes her longstanding and continuing opposition to EMU as she prepared for and attended the Strasbourg EC Council meeting in December 1989:

I was as strongly opposed to the holding of an IGC on economic and monetary union as ever. Equally I had little hope of blocking it altogether.... By the time I arrived in Strasbourg I knew that I would be more or less on my own. I decided to be sweetly reasonable throughout, since there was no point in causing gratuitous offence when I could not secure what I really wanted.

An IGC was eventually agreed for December 1990, later to be joined by another on political union which all then came together yet another year later at the Maastricht Summit of December 1991, the outcome of which causes the almost pan-European miserywe are witnessing today.

Thatcher was removed from Downing Street before these IGC even began their deliberations. One of the tools for that removal was the ambitious Michael Heseltine, a brief read of whose Early Life and business dealings must have made him the perfect tool  to those intent on removing Margaret Thatcher from office, an essential if the European federalists were to succed in neutering national democracies and imposing their chosen weapon of control, the Euro, all across the then 12 member states of the European Community.