Despite all the protestations about euroscepticism, the Conservatives are the party of Europe. Ted Heath took us in and each successive Tory government since has embedded us ever more irrevocably. The most surprising contributor to the European project was Margaret Thatcher, she of the mighty handbag. Here are extracts from a superb speech about the Channel Tunnel by Lord Adonis, universally regarded as the finest Minister of State for Transport in decades, at the University of Kent in 2009:
"I have three observations on the history of the tunnel. First, it took us a century and a quarter to get over our deep-seated Euroscepticism and dig the thing. The Victorians didn't call it Euroscepticism; they called it "splendid isolation", but it amounted to the same thing. But secondly, once Lady Thatcher - of all people, such are the ironies of politics - decided the time had come to start digging, the treaty to build the tunnel was negotiated in barely 18 months, and the entire tunnel was completed in just eight years after that...............
................It was Lady Thatcher, in one of her remarkable pro-European acts of the mid-1980s, who put an end to this nonsense. Sir Nicholas Henderson, the first chairman of Eurotunnel and a former British ambassador to both France and Germany, said it was because she wanted to make a positive move towards our European partners after the years of wrangling over the EU budget; it was also part of her commitment to building a genuine European free trade area, as seen also in her support for the Single European Act and the 1992 single market programme. As I noted earlier, the negotiation of the Treaty of Canterbury took just 18 months. Let me therefore submit to you that Lady Thatcher has been much maligned as an anti-European. The Channel Tunnel ought to be credited as one of her principal historical legacies, ending more than a century of dithering and arguably contributing more than any other single institution besides the European Union to our European destiny. She may or may not welcome that reappraisal."
http://newsgroups.derkeiler.com/Archive/Uk/uk.railway/2009-02/msg00402.html