Thatcher and Howe
Arunabha Sengupta
Margaret Thatcher might have had her reasons when she publicly rejected British participation in the European single currency project. But it did not make her soar in the popularity charts.
In fact, Chancellor of the Exchequer Nigel Lawson and Foreign Secretary Geoffrey Howe both tried to persuade her, but their entreaties could not really penetrate the Iron Lady.
Howe, especially, was quite disheartened. When he resigned from office as Deputy Prime Minister in November 1990, Howe recalled the British negotiations on EMU in Europe very vividly:
“It is rather like sending your opening batsmen to the crease, only for them to find, as the first balls are being bowled, that their bats have been broken before the game by the team captain.”
The speech, with this sparkling cricketing simile, is widely seen as the key moment in the chain of events that led to Mrs Thatcher’s resignation as Prime Minister later in the same month, after a tenure of eleven and a half months.
Margart Thatcher, the Prime Minister who thus tripped on a cricketing analogy, was born on 13 October 1925.
The picture shows them putting their heads together, something they did less and less ever since the Falkland War of 1982.