In her 2002 book Statecraft: Strategies for a Changing World, Margaret Thatcher’s words can be seen as resoundingly prophetic for many eurosceptics, as she predicted that the eurozone would ultimately face a crisis and fail. The Iron Lady wrote about the single currency: “This project is essentially political, rather than economic. The power to issue a currency is a fundamental attribute of sovereignty, not some symbolic or technical matter.”

The Iron Lady concluded: “The European single currency is bound to fail, economically, politically and indeed socially, though the timing, occasion and full consequences are still necessarily unclear.“It therefore follows that countries which have not already joined the project would be well-advised to keep out. The failure cannot be rectified by the American or other international attempts to rescue the euro, because the fundamentals of the euro-land are irremediably unsound."