Jacques Delors, a passionate advocate of post-war European integration and a founding father of the EU’s single currency project, has died, his family said. He was 98.

The French socialist served as president of the European Commission, the EU executive, for three terms — longer than any other holder of the office — from January 1985 until the end of 1994, a time of rapid change for Europe’s emerging union.

The era was marked by forthright clashes of vision between federalists such as Delors, who believed passionately in an “ever closer union”, and Britain’s then Prime
Minister Margaret Thatcher, who firmly resisted any shift of power to Brussels.

So antagonistic did relations between London and Brussels become towards the end of Thatcher’s time in office, especially over the plans for monetary union, that The Sun tabloid famously ran a front page headline reading: “Up Yours Delors”.

Delors’ death came three years after Britain fully exited the EU on December 31, 2020. Delors, a Catholic trade unionist, was an outspoken force at the heart of the Brussels bureaucracy.