Some political certainty has gone from my life.

On the day of her election as PM in May1979, I was living in Texas but had arranged a business trip to Algeria to allow me to spend election day in the UK. I passed the polling hours in Crewe and returned to the Westbury Hotel in Mayfair to watch the results coming in on TV. There was no doubt in my mind that Maggie Thatcher would win and begin the process of pulling us back from the degradation to which Wilson, Callaghan and their side-kicks had delivered the nation.

Before the start of the decade of the eighties I was back in London with new employers and challanges. At the dying moments of that decade I had left again, certain that Thatcher had failed in spite of the first few hopeful years and their quite amazing advances. She was betrayed by the members of her own party of the kind who still control it to this day.

In January 1990 she held a seminar at Chequers on the threats to Europe and democracy from the reunification of Germany. A note on the perceived risks is linked here in pdf format. (Downloaded from the Margaret Thatcher Foundation, linked here). Her actual removal from power was arranged, we can now almost completely certainly see, as a result of her opposition to European Monetary Union, as such was necessary to achieve German objectives as we can see today in the telling phrase from the above linked paper "we pay so we must have our way"

EMU, it is perfectly obvious today, was an essential tool, given thousands warned the Euro would never work, precisely and solely to put Germany exactly in that position which they are so obviously thoroughly enjoying today.

Maggie Thatcher, as I will always think of her,  had a capacity to recognise what in the Middle Ages would have been described as pure evil. We will all miss that certainty, even those who think she was wrong!