Thatcher's 'tears over EU rebate' revealed

Published on Saturday 4 July 2009 19:54

MARGARET Thatcher's famous budget rebate "victory" in Europe 25 years ago was actually a defeat which left her broken and in tears, it was claimed yesterday.

French economist Jacques Attali was a senior adviser to president Francois Mitterrand when prime minister Thatcher demanded "my money back" at an EU summit in Fontainebleau in 1984.

Now 65, he says she lost the rebate battle because she had to accept only half of her "embarrassing" demands.

But Thatcher returned to London triumphant with a long-term deal to cut Britain's EU budget contribution – a deal still operating, and which has saved the Treasury billions of pounds in the last quarter of a century.

Since becoming prime minister five years earlier, Thatcher had stridently complained that the UK's net contributions to the Euro budget were too high – because the money clawed back in grants and subsidies was unfairly small.

The row came to a head at the acrimonious Fontainebleau meeting of Europe's then ten leaders when a deal was done to give the UK an annual rebate on the sums it paid into the Community coffers. Attali, interviewed for the BBC's The Record: Europe, screened this weekend on BBC World and BBC Parliament, says it was a "mistake" to give Thatcher any money back at all.

The programme tells how Thatcher found herself bartering at the Fontainebleau talks to get at least half of the sum she wanted as a rebate. The bidding reached 65 per cent, and she pleaded with President Mitterrand to give her just one more percentage point to take home – and she returned to London with 66 per cent of what she was after.

Mr Attali recalls: "…you will find the minutes of the discussion in one of my books… where you will see that Mrs Thatcher was asking something like 2,000 ecus (a pre-single currency European accounting unit] and she ended up crying, crying in the middle of the meeting, accepting, begging half of it."

He goes on: "It was a defeat. Because she was coming there to get twice as much as she has got.

Actually she cried. Mitterrand told me: 'She has broken like a piece of glass.' I was surprised to see that. She was really broken when she accepted the final deal."