Henry has launched his blog. This is what he wrote about Margaret Thatcher:

“Margaret Thatcher’s great testimonial is the City of London, with its humming energy, its extraordinary buildings, the leading financial centre in one of the planet’s three time zones, the place where everyone but the Nigerian cleaner earns a six-figure salary.

Margaret Thatcher was a passionate defender of her nation state. She was “modern” in that she saw, and proclaimed, that the engine of a successful nation state is its economy. Her country was a great firm, competing with others in an ordered world.

Her great battle, which she won, was against those whom she saw as enemies of progress, the trades unions. She arrived at a moment when the trades unions had proved incapable as partners in the management of the state. Only those over 50 years will remember the  “winter of discontent” in 1979, when the country came to a standstill. She took on those unions. It was brutal, shocking to a country which had not known violent internal conflict for hundreds of years.

Margaret Thatcher was clear about the benefits of “Europe”. It was Britain’s main market and she set out to widen and enlarge it. Just as a great firm aims to “manage” the government’s regulatory bodies, she saw the the European Economic Community, as it was still called, as both trade organisation and regulator. Both had to be managed in the interests of here nation state.

America, not Europe, was the ideological partner, and the mission was absolutely specific. To extend liberal democracy across the world using the economic success of model countries as the driver. In this process the UK was an important but junior partner. Margaret Thatcher played a key role in the fall of the Soviet Union, which set off the movement of former Soviet satellites into the European fold.

She was infuriated when Jacques Delors came to speak to the British Trades Union Congress in 1988, getting a standing ovation and probably turning Labour into a “European” party overnight. The famous Bruges speech was an expression of her rage. And thus was crystallised the meme that every British Prime Minister echoes after a visit to Brussels: I succeeded in preventing yet another infringement of our sovereignty.

For all her attention to the detail of texts, she never really “got” the language of the Treaty of Rome, that phrases like “ever closer union” were real, that there were capable men and women, within the body of the European Commission, carrying that forward, patiently but persistently. Therefore she, like so many others, ended up claiming to have been tricked or misled. In her rage the Eurosceptic movement was born. 

However, the obsession with sovereignty signals the edginess of a country that has not adapted successfully to the move from Great Power to Nation State. Her successor, John Major, tried to define a policy of “variable geometry” without Britain being “marginalised”. It was a sensible policy but Britain’s right-wing press, inflamed by vocal Eurosceptics, made it look utterly weak and indecisive.

Margaret Thatcher’s legacy is problematic. She left a lesion in her party. But she was a great prime minister.”

I asked him how many readers he had. He said the analytics said about 150. I was surprised. He did not publicise the blog that I am aware of. That suggests that there is a community of people interested in what he has to say. Former colleagues perhaps?