Back in 1975, we may recall, when Mrs Thatcher had just become Tory leader, she played a very prominent role in the campaign to keep us in the Common Market. But after 11 years as prime minister, at “the heart of Europe”, she had completely reversed her view. This was because she had come to realise that everything she had originally been told about the real nature and purpose of the “European project” was wrong.

She had come to understand that its only real agenda in all it did was to work towards “ever closer union”, under a form of governance like nothing the world had seen before. The purpose was to weld all Europe together under a government that was “supranational”, never intended to be in any sense accountable or democratic and was based on gradually removing from the member states any important power to govern themselves. (….)

A startling passage from Margaret Thatcher’s last book in 2003 where she wrote: “That such an unnecessary and irrational project as building a European super-state was ever embarked on will seem in future years to be perhaps the greatest folly of the modern era. And that Britain, with her traditional strengths and global destiny, should ever have become part of it, will appear a political error of the first magnitude”.

Christopher Booker i telegraph