Dover grammar boy in her cabinet

AMONG those who served in Margaret Thatcher’s government was former Dover Grammar School boy Francis Arthur Cockfield, who became Baron Cockfield in 1978 and was appointed Minister of State at the Treasury after Mrs Thatcher became Prime Minister in May 1979, a post he held until April 1982.

He was made a member of the Privy Council and Secretary of State for Trade from 1982, and after the 1983 general election he was Chancellor of the Duchy of Lancaster, an adviser to the Prime Minister.

Lord Cockfield resigned from the cabinet in September 1984 to join the European Commission as commissioner for internal market tax law and customs.

Mrs Thatcher thought he was a “dour, uncompromising, elderly Euro-sceptic” but Lord Cockfield, who was made internal market commissioner by EC president Jacques Delors, produced a White Paper listing 283 trade barriers which needed to be abolished to create a “frontier-free Europe”.

Against every barrier, he listed what needed to be done and a timetable for them to be abolished - all by December 1992. Mrs Thatcher accused him of “going native”.

In June 1988, he announced that Britain would eventually have to drop its veto on a single currency and jokingly said that Mrs Thatcher was, in reality, pro-European and that a statue of her should be erected on the White Cliffs with an arm outstretched toward the Continent and an inscription stating: “There lies our future!”

Mrs Thatcher, not amused, asked Lord Cockfield to come and see her to discuss his second term.

That morning an announcement was sent to the media that Leon Brittan was to succeed him in Brussels. Lord Cockfield read about his dismissed in the papers before the discussion took place.

Lord Cockfield died in January 2007, aged 90.