{"id":674951,"date":"2026-07-05T11:50:19","date_gmt":"2026-07-05T11:50:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/674951\/"},"modified":"2026-07-05T11:50:19","modified_gmt":"2026-07-05T11:50:19","slug":"fury-at-eu-role-in-thatcher-coup-ignited-brexit-campaign-politics-news","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/674951\/","title":{"rendered":"Fury at EU role in Thatcher ‘coup’ ignited Brexit campaign | Politics | News"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Lord<\/p>\n

Lord Daniel Hannan (Image: Steve Finn)<\/p>\n

There is a direct link between a land invasion on a farm in Peru and the birth of the movement which led Britain out<\/a> of the European Union<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhen I was five years old, a mob attacked our family farm,\u201d Daniel Hannan remembers. \u201cThey were attacking all the farms in the valley.\u201d<\/p>\n

His parents debated whether or not to flee the invaders. The future eurosceptic campaigner<\/a> gained a first-hand experience of the fear and chaos that can erupt in a country where \u201cdisorder was normal\u201d.<\/p>\n

\u201cYears later,\u201d he says, \u201cit struck me that the most shocking thing about that whole episode is that no one had been shocked. It was totally unsurprising in a country like that.\u201d<\/p>\n

His father \u2013 who was educated in Britain and who had fought in World War 2 \u2013 and his Scottish mother, who met his dad while working in the British embassy in Lima, sent their son to England for his schooling. There, he was astounded at the delights Britons took for granted.<\/p>\n

\u201cI was just blown away by the wonder of being in a place where you could drink the tap water<\/a> and you flick the switch and the light actually came on because there was 24-hour electricity\u2026 When you stopped at a traffic light, you didn’t have every car behind you hooting, and when the guy in the shop gave you change, you didn’t have to count it \u2013 I mean, this is amazing! Even now, all those years on, the wonder has not totally left me.\u201d<\/p>\n

As a child in England in the late 1970s, he was shocked to hear adults talk about a nation that had \u201cgone to the dogs\u201d.<\/p>\n

\u201cI still think that most Brits are blas\u00e9 about the wonderful things about this country,\u201d he says. \u201cThey take them for granted because they’ve not known alternatives, and that’s why I get maybe more agitated than other people when I see these things slipping.\u201d<\/p>\n

He is worried about the \u201cepidemic of shoplifting\u201d and fears that the \u201csocial stigma that stopped you doing it\u201d because it is a \u201closer thing to do\u201d has faded.<\/p>\n

His love of Britain reached new heights when Margaret Thatcher arrived in Downing Street.<\/p>\n

Today, sitting by a sun-filled window at the Institute of Economic Affairs, the venerable free market think tank he now leads, he speaks with excitement in his voice as he remembers this time: \u201cThe 1980s were a moment of extraordinary national revival\u2026 Every year was another improvement.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Lord<\/p>\n

Lord Hannan is the new director of the Institute of Economic Affairs (Image: STEVE FINN PHOTOGRAPHY)<\/p>\n

Lord Hannan castigates recent British prime ministers for shirking tough decisions, and contrasts this with the political courage of the PM remembered as the Iron Lady.<\/p>\n

\u201cShe was prepared to suffer short term unpopularity in return for long term prosperity,\u201d he says. \u201cEvery single privatisation was unpopular before it happened. In fact, pretty much everything she did was unpopular at the time.\u201d<\/p>\n

But her true \u201cgenius\u201d, he argues, \u201cwas just to move the rocks and let the grass grow \u2013 she released the genius of a great people.\u201d<\/p>\n

In his first term at Oriel College, Oxford, aged 18, an event took place which changed both British politics and his life forever \u2013 Margaret Thatcher was ousted.<\/p>\n

The former modern history student remembers: \u201cI think that was probably the moment when I began to get politically radicalised\u2026 She\u2019d won these three elections, and then she was brought down by this coalition of europhile backbenchers and EU leaders. And it felt like a coup and I was so angry about that.\u201d<\/p>\n

In December 1990 he sat down in the Queen’s Lane Coffee House, an establishment dating back to 1654, with two friends. One, Mark Reckless, would later make headlines as a Conservative MP when he defected to Ukip; the other friend, whom he refuses to name, is now a conductor \u201cleading a blameless life making beautiful music\u201d. They decided to launch the Oxford Campaign for an Independent Britain.<\/p>\n

\u201cSome people have said this is the first flowering of what became the Brexit<\/a> campaign,\u201d he remarks. \u201cI think it was.\u201d<\/p>\n

Their eurosceptic uprising touched a nerve with scores of students.<\/p>\n

\u201cWeirdly, it caught a mood,\u201d he remembers. \u201cAnd by the end of that term, which is only like three weeks later, we had like 300 members, which was extraordinary in those days.\u201d<\/p>\n

He invited the so-called Maastricht rebels to speak at the univeristy. These were the MPs fighting to stop the ratification of the treaty which would lay the foundation of the euro.<\/p>\n

\u201cHistory would have been very different, by the way,” he notes, \u201chad we stopped the Maastricht treaty. Brexit probably wouldn’t have happened; we’d have drifted much more gently into a kind of detached relationship.\u201d<\/p>\n

His campaigning continued after graduation. Together with Conservative MP Michael Spicer, he launched the European Research Group, serving as its first secretary.<\/p>\n

The ERG is now famed for its role in the Brexit wars, fighting attempts to keep the UK abiding by rules forged in Brussels. The title of the group was deliberately boring.<\/p>\n

The Tory MP had shot down his suggestions of names featuring emotive words such as \u201cdemocracy\u201d, \u201cindependence\u201d and \u201cfreedom\u201d on the grounds that \u201cif you have a campaign to take over the world, you don’t call it The Campaign To Take Over The World\u201d.<\/p>\n

\"Lord<\/p>\n

Lord Hannan was outraged by the toppling of Margaret Thatcher (Image: STEVE FINN PHOTOGRAPHY)<\/p>\n

His passion for defending British sovereignty did not dim and in 1999 he was elected \u2013 not to Westminster but to the European Parliament.<\/p>\n

\u201cMEPs were in those days self-selecting euro-fanatics who absolutely wanted a country called Europe,\u201d he explains. \u201cI thought, maybe the best thing is just to go there and direct my torch beam at some of the corners that they don’t really want people to know about.\u201d<\/p>\n

He helped the Danes’ campaign against joining the euro and fought for years for a referendum on the Lisbon Treaty. And in the UK he laid the foundations for what would become the Vote Leave campaign.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think I can claim to have founded it in the sense that I appointed Matthew Elliott as our chief executive,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

He remembers the excitement in the Vote Leave HQ in June 2016 as the referendum results flooded in from across the country. When victory was clear, he jumped on a table and recited an altered version of Henry V\u2019s \u201cwe happy few, we band of brothers\u201d speech \u2013 name-checking those who had worked so hard to deliver the result.<\/p>\n

Afterwards, he remembers walking by the Thames as the sky brightened with a \u201cbeautiful pink dawn\u201d. He brimmed with \u201cthis great sense of pride in everyone who had defied all of the bullies, all of the corporates, all of the foreign governments, all of the political party leaders, and done what they knew to be the right thing\u201d.<\/p>\n

Although he was a pioneering eurosceptic, he says he was not \u201chard line about what relationship we would have with the EU afterward\u201d \u2013 and he was shocked at the ferocity of the divisions which tore through the country.<\/p>\n

He admits: \u201cI was not prepared at all for what happened next, which is that Remainers lost all interest in trying to have a a gradual or flexible Brexit, and went all-in on a second referendum to try and overturn the result\u2026 In fact, they did not want a softening of the terms because they thought that would weaken the case for a second referendum. And Leavers, who had spent the previous 20 years saying, \u2018I voted for a common market, not a common government,\u2019 suddenly began to say, \u2018What do you mean you want a common market? You traitor, you europhile.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Lord<\/p>\n

Lord Hannan on a visit to Odessa (Image: Anadolu Agency via Getty Images)<\/p>\n

His mission to rescue Britain continues, and now his focus is on reviving prosperity.<\/p>\n

He has a simple diagnosis of what has gone wrong: \u201cWe have not processed what we did during lockdown. We paid ourselves to stay at home for the better part of two years. We were borrowing from our future selves. The price rises, the tax rises, the debt, the welfarism, the truancy, the petty crime, the shoplifting, they are all consequences of what we we might call long lockdown.\u201d<\/p>\n

Net zero should be suspended, he argues, so we are not \u201cneedlessly impoverishing ourselves\u201d and he wants to boost the jobs market by making it less risky to take on staff.<\/p>\n

He believes littering is more common since the lockdowns, and again looks back to his first days in this nation.<\/p>\n

\u201cPeople didn’t do that when I first came here, and I loved the fact that they didn’t because I come from a place where everyone did.\u201d<\/p>\n

Aged 54 and ablaze with crusading energy, there is every reason to think Lord Hannan will continue to shape the UK as he pushes Britons to recognise the brilliance of their homeland.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Lord Daniel Hannan (Image: Steve Finn) There is a direct link between a land invasion on a farm…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":674952,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[934,50982,84,225661,935,225662,59,2054,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-674951","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-business","tag-brexit","tag-brexit-news","tag-business","tag-daniel-hannan","tag-european-union","tag-euroscepticism","tag-gb","tag-margaret-thatcher","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/674951","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=674951"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/674951\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/674952"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=674951"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=674951"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=674951"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}