Whisper it quietly in case she starts waving her handbag in horror: Margaret Thatcher is winning in Europe. More than a decade after her fall from power in Britain, in part because of her stridency on Europe, the vision of "la dame de fer" is finding favour in Brussels.
If the former prime minister had wandered into the European parliament yesterday, she would have heard a distinctly Thatcherite speech. Jose Manuel Barroso, the centre-right former prime minister of Portugal, who is now the European commission president, told the EU that it must reform its hidebound economies or risk decline.
"Europe must do better. What we are proposing today is to release Europe's tremendous economic potential," Mr Barroso told MEPs as he relaunched the so-called "Lisbon agenda" to reform Europe's labour markets. For good measure, Mr Barroso echoed Lady Thatcher's famous declaration when he added: "There is not a credible alternative."
Dr Caroline Lucas, one of Britain's two Green MEPs, said the Barroso speech had a familiar ring. "This European commission is the most neo-Liberal in years. Listening to Barroso is like listening to Margaret Thatcher 15 years ago. This is just old-style economic dogma. It failed in Britain and is going to be reheated for Europe."
If the unease on the left is not enough to convince Lady Thatcher that her ideas are on the march again she should return to Paris, scene of her famous declaration on the steps of the British embassy that she would fight on after she failed to secure enough votes in the first round of the 1990 Tory leadership contest. Jacques Chirac, the French president, is so horrified by one of Mr Barroso's key ideas - the services directorate - that he despatched his prime minister to denounce it in unusually frank terms.
"This directive is unacceptable. We will take every measure to oppose this directive," Jean-Pierre Raffarin told the French national assembly of the measure which would liberalise trade in services. Mr Barroso indicated that he would water down the directive, but he insisted that barriers to the European single market must be removed. "No more foot-dragging on key areas of reform," he said.
With a referendum on the EU constitution months away, French sensitivities have to be handled carefully because there is widespread unease in Paris that France, which dominated the EU for long, is losing influence. The EU constitution is regularly denounced on the French left for being too "Anglo-Saxone" in liberalising economies. Mr Barroso normally chooses his words carefully, but over the weekend he took a swipe when he dismissed the cherished French way of directing most affairs in France from the centre. "Dirigisme is off the agenda," he told the Wall Street Journal.
One idea doing the rounds among pro-Europeans for next year's referendum is to cast the "Yes" camp as the true holders of the Thatcher flame. Campaigners are thinking of re-playing the tape of her notorious "no, no, no" Commons riposte in 1990 to a series of federalist ideas from her arch enemy Jacques Delors.
"Mr Delors said at a press conference the other day that he wanted the European parliament to be the democratic body of the community, he wanted the commission to be the executive and he wanted the council of ministers to be the senate. No, no, no," Lady Thatcher said in remarks which eventually led to her downfall after Geoffrey Howe resigned in disgust.
"Yes" campaigners will take great delight in pointing out that the EU constitution guarantees that none of Delors' ideas has come to pass.
We are European, why would we do that?
