she was ambushed into accepting a new treaty, the Single European Act,

she tried to pretend that it was about little more than creating a more

effective “single market”. In fact, as its name indicated, this was

another major step towards building “a single Europe”.

From now on, she found herself increasingly isolated in her opposition

to the relentless integration, as was reflected in her Bruges speech of

1988. In 1989, this became still more obvious as her fellow leaders,

driven by Jacques Delors, prepared for the ambitious leap forward to be

embodied in the Maastricht Treaty, including that supreme symbol of a

“single Europe”, a single currency.

Knowing she would have a veto, the Europhiles saw her as the last huge

obstacle to their ambitions. We recall in October 1990 her impassioned

response to Delors’s hubristic claim that within ten years Europe would

be ruled by a new government, with the Commission as its executive, the

European Parliament as its chief lawmaking body and the Council of

Ministers as its Senate. To each of his points she famously replied “No,

no, no”.

Both abroad and at home, the Europhiles now knew she had to go. Two

weeks later, Geoffrey Howe’s poisonous resignation speech, designed to

allow his ally Michael Heseltine to challenge for the leadership, had

done the trick. It was not the poll tax that brought her down but

“Europe”. From that time on, her contempt for the “European project” and

all it stood for knew no bounds.

In 1996, I and my family were with her at a house party in Scotland. She

suggested one evening that the teenagers present, including my son

Nicholas, should be given a chance to ask her questions. Nick asked her:

“Lady Thatcher, do you think we should leave the European Union?” She

replied: “There are five reasons why we should leave it”.

Ticking them off on the fingers of her hand, she spent 20 minutes

outlining them. When this flight of oratory ended, Nick said: “Lady

Thatcher, you’ve only given us four reasons. What is the fifth?” “You’re

quite right”, she said, holding up her little finger. “The fifth reason

why we should leave” – dramatic pause – “is that THEY STOLE OUR FISH”.

Six years later, in her last book, Statecraft, she couldn’t have

put her view more succinctly. She wrote: “…that such an unnecessary and

irrational project as building a European superstate 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”.

The second momentous issue on which Mrs Thatcher played a far more

influential role than is generally realised was global warming. When the

scare erupted in 1988, she was the first world leader who not only

adopted it as the last great cause of her premiership, but made moves

that helped to push it rapidly towards the top of the international

agenda. She made passionate speeches to the Royal Society and the United

Nations.

Even more significantly, she gave full backing to one of the most

fervent evangelists for the belief that the world was threatened by

human emissions of carbon dioxide, Dr John Houghton, then head of the

Met Office.

No one played a more crucial role than Houghton in setting up in 1988

the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. This was the body

that was to become the central driver in promoting the worldwide scare

over global warming through a series of mammoth reports, the first three

of which Houghton did more to shape than anyone.

Without their influence, we would not have had the Rio Earth Summit, the

Kyoto Protocol, and all those political responses to the scare that, in

the past two decades, have had such a dramatic impact on international

energy policy – nowhere more disastrously and at greater cost than in

the European Union, with Britain’s suicidal Climate Change Act

potentially the most damaging consequence of all.

The fiasco of that mammoth Copenhagen conference in 2009 may have marked

the moment when, politically, the panic over climate change finally

began to crumble apart, as it became clear that the fast-growing

countries of the developing world, led by China and India, were simply

not going to buy into a treaty that would have landed mankind with the

biggest bill in history.

But seven years before that, again in her last book, Lady Thatcher had

already written, under the heading “Hot air and global warming”, what

amounted to a complete recantation of her earlier views, voicing

precisely those fundamental doubts over the warming panic that were

later to become familiar.

Pouring scorn on what she called “the doomsters”, she questioned all the

main scientific assumptions that had been used to drive the scare, from

the conviction that the main force shaping the world climate is CO2,

rather than natural factors such as solar activity, to exaggerated

claims about rising sea levels. She mocked Al Gore and the futility of

what she recognised as “costly and economically damaging” schemes to

reduce CO2 emissions.

She cited the 2.5 degree rise in temperatures during the Medieval Warm

Period as having had almost entirely beneficial effects. She pointed out

that the dangers of a world getting colder are far worse than those of a

CO2-enriched world growing warmer. She recognised how distortions of

the science had been used to mask an anti-capitalist, Left-wing

political agenda that posed a very serious threat to human progress and

prosperity.

Thus, long before it became fashionable, Lady Thatcher was converted to

the view of those who on both scientific and political grounds have

become ever more sceptical of the entire climate change ideology. How

odd it is that, even today, so few people realise what a key role she

played in helping to promote that scare in the first place. But even

fewer realise how she eventually came to make as great a U-turn on this

issue as any in her life.

Many people have noticed how, in trying to assess this force of nature

who exploded to the centre of our national life 34 years ago, one so

often has to balance the positives and the negatives in all she stood

for. The upsides in the end far outweighed the downsides.

But the fact that on these two great issues she came so radically to

change her mind is yet another measure of the difference that has set

her apart from all those political pygmies who have followed.