Thatcher's thunderous "No. No. No." thrilled her party, prophesied thirty years of European agony, and lit the fuse that blew up her own premiership within the month.

By late October 1990 Margaret Thatcher was eleven years into office and closer to its end than anyone in the chamber quite realised. She had returned from a Rome summit at which the other eleven member states had, in effect, ambushed her over the timetable for economic and monetary union, and she came to the despatch box in a mood of magnificent, unyielding combat. The immediate exchange is with Neil Kinnock, whom she flays with characteristic relish as "Little Sir Echo" — a man who, in her telling, would say "Me, too" to anything Brussels proposed. But the sentences that mattered were not aimed at Kinnock at all. They were aimed at Jacques Delors and, through him, at the whole federalist architecture: Parliament as democratic chamber, Commission as executive, Council as Senate. Her answer was three monosyllables that entered the language: "No. No. No."

The listeners who counted were on her own benches. Geoffrey Howe, her longest-serving colleague, sat and absorbed a tone he found intolerable. Within a fortnight he had resigned, and on 13 November delivered the broken-cricket-bat resignation speech that detonated her premiership. Michael Heseltine challenged; she failed to win outright on the first ballot; and by 28 November — less than a month after these words — she was gone, weeping in the back of a Downing Street car. The "No. No. No." that so thrilled the Tory right proved the trigger for her destruction.

History has been generous to her prescience, if not to her diplomacy. Her warnings about a single currency, a European central bank beyond democratic accountability, and the erosion of the Commons' authority read now less like Little Englander paranoia than like a forecast of the arguments that would consume British politics for the next three decades, up to and beyond the referendum of 2016. She saw the destination and refused the road; her party would spend a generation quarrelling about whether she had been right.

It is worth reading today because it is Thatcher in full voice at the very edge of the precipice — combative, clever, contemptuous, and entirely unaware that the cliff was three paces ahead.

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