Margaret Thatcher: 'This is no time to go wobbly' and other memorable quotes

A Monitor reporter who briefly overlapped with Margaret Thatcher when he was Paris correspondent recounts her outsized presence at European gatherings.

|
AP/File
President Ronald Reagan and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher speak to reporters at the White House in Washington, June 1982. Thatcher had enjoyed a remarkably close bond with President Reagan, once describing him as 'the second most important man' in her life.

Margaret Thatcher is being remembered as the prime minister who remade Britain's economy, the “Iron Lady” who stood up to communism and who fought and won a war in the distant South Atlantic.

But to this reporter (who briefly overlapped with Mrs. Thatcher as the Monitor’s Paris correspondent from 1989 to 1994), she is remembered as the British leader who could be counted on for a good quote.

Amid a sea of mild, if sometimes dull, European leaders, Thatcher stood out for always speaking her mind.

At the end of various summits of the European Council, reporters fretted over which of the many simultaneously scheduled press conferences with this president or that prime minister to attend. But there was no such deliberating over Thatcher. She always got the big auditorium while other leaders had to settle for diminutive side rooms.

Part of Mrs. Thatcher’s draw was her reputation. This woman among men, who always carried her handbag with her to the press conference stage, was remembered for telling Europe in 1984, “I want my money back!” (Her actual quote, as she insisted that Britain deserved a refund of its contribution to the European budget, was, “We are simply asking to have our own money back.”)

But she never disappointed. One of her more memorable quotes came in 1990 (although not at a council summit): “No. No. No,” she declared in response to Frenchman Jacques Delors, then president of the European Commission, and his prediction that European institutions would become the seats of democracy in Europe.

Thatcher had enjoyed a remarkably close bond with President Reagan, once describing him as “the second most important man” in her life. But by the time George H.W. Bush arrived at the White House in 1989, things were different for the Anglo-American relationship. Thatcher was under attack at home, even from within her own party, and a crumbling Iron Curtain had President Bush focusing more of his attention on West Germany.

Eager to manage the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe in an orderly and stabilizing manner, Bush would use a trip to Europe to underscore the importance his administration would give to US-Germany relations. And so in Brussels, Europe’s capital, Bush would leave Thatcher “cooling her heels” (to quote from an earlier dispatch), as he met with the European Commission president first.

It was not an order of importance that Thatcher was accustomed to from a US leader.

Thatcher would be out of office before Bush, but she would not go before supplying one last juicy quote. As Bush mulled over what to do in response to Saddam Hussein’s invasion of Kuwait in August 1990 – to repel the Iraqi leader militarily or not – Thatcher would tell Bush in an aside at an Aspen Institute conference, “Remember George, this is no time to go wobbly.”

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

QR Code to Margaret Thatcher: 'This is no time to go wobbly' and other memorable quotes
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Foreign-Policy/2013/0408/Margaret-Thatcher-This-is-no-time-to-go-wobbly-and-other-memorable-quotes
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe