Her remarks led to the resignation of deputy prime minister Geoffrey Howe and the ensuing Conservative Party leadership election in which Thatcher was ousted.

Both her foreign secretary Geoffrey Howe and chancellor Nigel Lawson had threatened resignation the previous year if Thatcher did not agree to let Britain join the European Exchange Rate Mechanism.

At the summit, Thatcher went against her cabinet's joint position by rejecting Britain's membership of any future arrangement for an economic and monetary union.

Perhaps, being totally incompetent with monetary matters, they'd be only too delighted to hand over the full responsibility, as they did to the IMF, to a central bank",[1] the final part of her statement a reference to the 1976 sterling crisis under a Labour government.

[6] Thatcher's biographer Charles Moore felt that she expressed her words "firmly" but "not vehemently", with each pronunciation of the negative exclamation "spoken quieter than the last" as she put her spectacles on, preparing to move on to her next point.

[5] Moore also felt that Thatcher's response was "endlessly and rightly quoted afterwards" as part of a "classic combative statement of her views" but was "almost always wrenched from its context"; she was not attacking the Community (EEC) or undermining her own government's policies, but was instead attacking the Commission for its ambition of further European integration (which her government and most Conservative MPs opposed),[7] denouncing the idea that the EEC should acquire the attributes of a European government.

[8] In a 1995 interview with Swedish journalist Stina Lundberg Dabrowski, Thatcher made a self-deprecating reference to the speech, responding to Dabrowski's repeated attempts to persuade Thatcher to jump at the end of the interview with "'No, no, no', to coin a phrase.