"There was no such thing as UKIP under Margaret Thatcher, her Euroscepticism was taken for granted," Newsnight viewers were informed by that Olympic standard social climber and name-dropper, Kentucky Fried Chicken heir, and stalwart both of the Henry Jackson Society and of the pro-apartheid Springbok Club, Andrew Roberts.
Roberts holds no higher degree, and he has never held an academic position. But his books are much admired by the noted polymath, George W Bush. They contain repeated misspellings of the same place names, they assume that historical figures with the same name were the same person, they repeatedly refer to the Red Army marching eastwards across Europe, and they suggest that Amritsar is in the south of India.
Thatcher's Euroscepticism is the opposite of the truth. She signed the Single European Act, campaigned in 1983 specifically against an Opposition with a manifesto commitment to withdraw, and took until a rally in the run-up to the 2001 Election, ten and a half years after the end of her ten and a half years as Prime Minister, to come out against a single currency. By then, it was far from obvious that she really knew what she was saying.
What is to be Roberts's next gem? That Thatcher believed in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland? That Thatcher upheld traditional family values, and traditional teaching methods in schools? That Thatcher was an unbending defender of British sovereignty in the Falkland Islands, and of the capacity of the Royal Navy?
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That does not mean that people did not perceive her as Eurosceptic. She was certainly a British nationalist, in the nicest sense of the term.
ReplyDeleteNothing in her record bears that out for one moment. Quite the reverse, in fact.
ReplyDeleteIn all fairness, Gibbon, Macaulay, and Barbara Tuchman managed to write significant works of historiography while having no more in the way of postgraduate qualifications than Roberts does.
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