It is hard for me to monitor this from my prison cell in Florida as I wait for the spurious and failed prosecution of me to flounder to an end, but it seems to me that Britain has failed adequately to recognise that Margaret Thatcher was correct in almost everything she said about Eurofederalism. She was a prophet who was sent packing because of her prescience, amid all that bunk about being ‘uncaring’. There was too much attention paid to the spivvy parvenus who most ostentatiously gained from her policies, and not enough to the millions of the unashamed bourgeois who gratefully made her the first prime minister since Lord Liverpool to earn three consecutive full terms. Surely it is time her effigy was in Parliament Square, to make George Canning less lonely in his toga.
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Germany’s new status as the land of salvation and rescue is piquant, and well deserved. For over a century it was a truism that Germany was too late unified, unclear whether it should face west or east, and that whenever it tried to assure its own security it destabilised or assaulted its neighbours. Berlin is dotted with the architectural remnants of failed regimes: Hohenzollerns, Nazis, East German communists. All astute European statesmen from Richelieu to de Gaulle realised that, if unified, Germany would be pre-eminent in Europe. But the Federal Republic, led by the anti-flamboyant Angela Merkel, is faithfully enacting Helmut Kohl’s sincere vision of ‘a European Germany, not a German Europe’. My hunch is that Chancellor Merkel will not approve eurobond issues for the benefit of the most precarious eurozone countries until they have emulated the market reforms that Germany has implemented, which have reduced its unemployment rate from 9.6
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