 I haven't spoken about Margaret Thatcher in Dublin ever before in my life, and in a way I'm not going to do so much about her biographically, I'm going to do that at a separate occasion tonight, but I wanted to do a bit of then and now really and link the sort of argument she had then with what's going on with what's going on now. First of all, as Dahi mentioned, my book is a two volume book. Volume one ends with the Falklands War. When we have discussion afterwards, please feel free to ask me about absolutely everything that you might want, but there will be occasions in volume two material where either I won't tell you something because it's as yet not for the public eye, or more likely because I still don't know the answer because it's a work in progress. So, I can't give you necessarily such full answers for the later period, say the Anguariash agreement, for example, as I can for the earlier. But basically, that's an inhibition on me, not on you, so have a go at whatever you want. What I wanted to talk in my speech about is, it's now a long enough period since Mrs Atch's fall to be able to think about the history of the European Union, and particularly Britain in the European Union, sort of intergenerationally, and we can think back. There's enough perspective to begin to be able to look at that. I think it does tell you some interesting things, and also you can see things emerging into the current situation, which were quite hard to perceive at the time, but are now clearer. So, first I need to say a bit about what Mrs Atcher did think about the European Union, which of course it was not then called, it was called the European Economic Community, then it came the European Community, and then it became, after she left office, the European Union. She started from the position of being in favour of it, and her main reasons for being in favour of it were some general idea about free trade, and an even stronger idea about the Cold War and the need for post-war Europe to be strong against the communist threat. She always saw NATO as being more important in that than the EC, but she saw them as going together and she wished to encourage that. And she was not at all unorthodox about the European community when her party was predominantly in favour of the European community, except that she never was an enthusiast. The way I've sometimes put it is that she went to church but she didn't take communion. She did not have the Ted Heath passion for the subject, and she had a fairly basic British lower middle class lack of interest and knowledge when she started in foreigners. So the idea that Britain, and she's so ultra patriotic, the idea that British people would have, Britain as a country, would have much to learn from people who'd made, as she saw it, such a mess of the continent in her lifetime and before, did not come naturally to her. And so she, even in the early times, and I'm talking about the 1970s, she became a leader in 1975, that's something in a sort of worm of doubt in her mind about it all. But somebody told me that when she watched, we had the referendum, you may remember, a post-entry referendum. We entered in 1972-73 and Labour government held a referendum in 1975 by which time Mrs Thatcher was leader. And of course she advocated a yes vote. But friends of mine were with her on watching the no broadcast at the end of the campaign. And she sat there and said, God, it's absolutely marvellous, I agree with every word. And so there was some sort of instinct there, she wasn't wholly comfortable. When she became Prime Minister she had a famous battle which had its most spectacular, at least early manifestation in Dublin actually because it was the European Council in December. In 1979, where she went on and on and on about what she called our money, the British budgetary contribution, so much that the great leaders of Europe did all sorts of, I think, Helmut Schmidt read a newspaper and Valerie Gieskandistam pretended to go to sleep, or possibly genuinely did go to sleep. And she was really, that was the first big impact of her on the Europeans seen as being so bloody minded. And this was a famous budgetary battle which I think was generally, though mostly tacically acknowledged, she was fundamentally in the right on the issue whether she was wrong or not about the tactics. And she prevailed in that on points after a very long fight in Fontainebleau in 1984. Because her overall political and economic position had greatly strengthened in that time, she then went into the most positive period of her European engagement. When she decided that the EC was a vehicle for, or could be a vehicle for open markets, economic reform, a different way of rolling back the frontiers of the state and so on. And that's why she engaged with the single European Act. And also, and this is very important dimension, she did see it as a way of reaching out to the people, not just dealing with the government of, but the people, reaching out to the people of the Eastern Bloc and those European countries. And she was actually quite a pioneer of that type of argument when a country like France would prefer to keep that close and didn't like that idea. So the single European Act was considered a success of hers for the sort of Europe that she wanted, a sort of more open Europe that she wanted. But just as all this was coming in, she began to be exercised by several fears. One was that the centralisation and the idea that it was too much power concentrated in the European community at the expense of its member states and its national parliaments. And the other related to that was the idea that it was becoming a socialist front organisation because Jacques de Law, as the first really important, powerful and able European commissioner, head of the European commissioner for a long time, was changing it so fast and in a way which, though she had considerable personal respect for him, she didn't like. And it was really because de Law had provoked her in 1988, he came to the TUC, the trade union congress in England and made a speech about socialism in Europe. Of course, nothing could have been more calculated to enrage her and they all sang Frère Jacques and things like that. And so the next month she made the famous speech in Bruges, which is her great denunciation of European centralisation. Famous phrase, but we have not rolled back the frontiers of the state in our country only to see them superimposed at an international, at a European level. And she also said, which again was quite visionary and not so combative, more of an important one, she said we must never forget that Prague and Budapest and Warsaw are great European cities. And this was not the fashionable thing to say because that was considered to be rocking the boat about the two power blocks. So she was talking about a wider Europe, but she was also challenging a Europe which was becoming overcentralised and to governmental. These were interesting arguments and they had some resonance, but they were basically not only unpopular with the main European powers, but they also came into a clash with the end of the Cold War because at the point which should have been the greatest thing for Margaret Thatcher because she longed for the end of the Cold War and had a considerable role in bringing it about. Certain things happened which she considered bad for the interests of Britain and bad she thought for a peace in Europe. And of course the thing she most strongly opposed and they were related. The first was the reunification of Germany where partly because she was anti-German, she just hated the idea of Germany being a very big country. But in fact I'm afraid I think she was very straightforwardly anti-German in the sort of generational way. She took me aside once and she said, she made sure nobody was listening and she said, you know what's the matter with Helmut Kohl? And I said no, no I don't. He said he's a German which was undeniable but I didn't know already. So there was that simple problem in her mind. There were more reasonable fears, which people have rather forgotten but there were reasonable fears at that time about the precipitate reunification of Germany could produce a reaction in the Soviet Union which meant the fall of Gorbachev and the restoration of the hardliners which actually did nearly happen in 1991. And so she was very worried about getting that balance right. And so she was very frightened by what was going on despite her great rejoicing at the fall of the Berlin Wall. And the other related thing which worried her was that the people like De Law and Mitterrand thought that the reunification of Germany which they also feared could only be horrible if you would have the single European currency because their belief was that the Germany would be held down and be made into a European Germany rather than a German Europe to use the famous phrase if its currency was all part of a European single currency. And so she found herself in real difficulties about all of this and she got rather hysterical about it so she didn't create alliances about it. She thought she was creating one with Mitterrand but she didn't. And she was absolutely enraged that Cole was with Reagan's departure and the arrival of President Bush that Americans are getting closer to Germany. And she couldn't contain her anger about that in 1989 at the end of the year at one of those summits. She said to Cole because she wasn't always tactful. She said twice in my life, sorry no, twice not in her life, twice in the 20th century we beat in the Germans and now they're here again. And it was that sort of, I think slightly an element of sexual jealousy in a way about was Germany going to be a greater power than Britain all over again. And because of getting these things tactically, at least tactically wrong, she was humiliated by what happened, outmaneuvered in the move towards economic and monetary union, isolated, plotted against not only at home but by European colleagues. And of course I think the biggest single reason why her senior colleagues in the party wanted to get rid of her was the European issue. And for her senior colleagues it wasn't, it was the poll tax but the elites were most worried about the European issue and they were successful. So she seemed to be at least in significant respects on the wrong side of history at that point and she fell in November 1990. Now if you go forward to today you will see of course what is the situation. It is that the Eurozone does remain in terrible trouble and you also see that the emergence of the Eurozone has done something which hasn't happened before in EU history, which is it has created two types of member state. It isn't just a matter of how fast one's going, it's a basic difference between, and this is going to be expressed probably in treaty change as well, between those who are in and those who are out. And it's something that goes beyond only the question of the currency, it's really a question of centralisation, it will soon be a question of who controls budgets and so on. So that's a very important change and there's also been the emergence of popular discontent across the continent about what's happening which was not by any means such a big factor in the Thatcher era. And here we are in Britain where David Cameron feels quite what he personally thinks about this, it's very hard to understand but he feels that he might not be re-elected unless he can, and he certainly, his leadership is insecure if he doesn't promise a referendum. And if he became Prime Minister, a referendum on Britain's membership renegotiated and if he became Prime Minister he would have to renegotiate in quite a serious way. He couldn't hope to do what Harold Wilson managed to do in 1975 and have a sort of fairly trivial renegotiation because his opponents within his own party would see through that. So he has to do something quite big and he doesn't know quite what that would be. And then of course there are masses of problems that in people's minds relate to the European issue like immigration. And there are all sorts of questions about what Britain could demand. One would be greater control over immigration. One would be to prevent the caucusing of the eurozone so that otherwise they can always prevail. Another would be some idea of red cards for national parliament, those sort of issues. And it's starting to look as if Britain might have some allies on some of these subjects in Europe. The Dutch are being quite helpful for the British position. And of course the big question is what would Germany want? What price would Angela Merkel, given that I think the Germans do want Britain to stay in the European Union, what price would Angela Merkel be prepared to pay to keep Britain in? And Cameron has been trying to get close, quite successfully to get close to Angela Merkel. And at the same time of course you have rising French anxiety because they are doing very badly and they feel they don't have a purchase on Germany anymore. So then there's the really quite extreme misery of Spain, Italy, Portugal and above all Greece. So these are bad times for euro files. And there's a real sense I think of democratic and financial difficulty in the European Union. And it's clear, speaking from a British point of view, that Britain has been a definite virtue for Britain in staying out of the euro. That view of what's happened with the euro, all of those, by the way I must declare my interest, including me, who have always been against British entry into the single currency feel very vindicated by what's happened with the eurozone. And we sort of thank our lucky stars that we're not in. And very important, we remember that all the political elites virtually said we should be in. And it was only by demanding a referendum, which was actually started by the eccentric Sir James Gilsmith referendum party in 1997, exacting a promise of a referendum on the single currency from all the parties. That's the only reason we didn't go in because they were scared they'd lose the referendum. So Blair in the end didn't quite dare go into the single currency. So we, the people as it were, who feel strongly on this issue, know that we only got away by the skin of our teeth. And we feel we did well out of that and we can see that many European countries are doing extremely badly out of it. So to come back to the question that I ask, it now starts to look as if Margaret Thatcher was prescient on at least some of the points that she made. She said very strongly at the time that the French theory of binding down Germany by creating a single currency was the reverse of the case. She said what's happened is, look, Germany is the country that's best with the money. Its money is the strongest if you create a euro as it was not then called. Far from diminishing Germany, you will Germanize the zone in which the euro operates. Germany will be the master of Europe, and that's not a good idea. And I think it's undeniable that in the euro zone that is what has happened. I wouldn't agree with Mrs Thatcher attribution of bad motive to Germany about that. I think that's quite false, but I think that that is actually the real result. And she also said that, of course, she raised the, this is not only a political problem, it's an economic question. Nobody has answered the basic point which she raised again and again about the problem of trying to have a currency in which one size fits all when it doesn't. So if you're living in a country like Greece now because you're not allowed to devalue, you are impoverishing yourself and your people are in really desperate situation. And actually I think it's quite surprising that there hasn't been even more unrest and violence when you have more than a quarter of the population unemployed. So it's a very serious question and not to mention the competitive sclerosis that comes into the euro zone at present where it's getting left behind by in global markets. And of course the issue that's never gone away of sovereignty and who does decide all these issues and who's entitled to and what is the democratic answerability when the European Central Bank can effectively, or European institutions can effectively decide who's going to be the emergency prime minister of Italy or Greece or whatever. And the point which something Mrs Atger was always good on is that money is serious. You can have a lot of rhetoric about European integration and indeed you can have a lot of European integration if it's institutional and if the shoe doesn't pinch. But if you actually create a currency then the sort of truth will out that you will find out what's really happening and you may not like it. And that I think is what's happening. So I think what I would argue and I think what people are sort of realising in Britain and possibly more widely is that all those awkward and unpopular questions that Mrs Atger raised in 1989 and 90 have not been satisfactorily answered and they remain the right questions which we do still need to answer. And therefore what she was shouting about about 25 years ago is actually just as relevant now as it was then and people are more ready to listen to it now than they were then. Thanks very much.