What would Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher do in respect of Brexit? That’s the question with which we’re wrestling as the second woman premier to lead Britain, Theresa May, flounders toward the March 29 date by which, absent a deal or an agreed-upon delay, Britain will finally regain its independence. How would the Iron Lady handle what the nervous Nellies are calling a colossal constitutional crisis?

We understand that Thatcher has left this mortal coil. We focus on her because, as we’ve often marked, the idea of Brexit took flight only after Thatcher delivered her famous speech at Bruges, Belgium. That was the speech in which she declared that Britons had not rolled back the frontiers of the state at home only to see “a European super-state exercising a new dominance from Brussels.”

That was in 1988. The speech inspired many among the conservative intelligentsia in Britain — the Bruges Group, it got dubbed — to think about independence. Yet punctilious editorial writing moves us to mark that Mrs. Thatcher herself stopped short of calling for Britain to leave the EU outright. Plus, too, she spoke in a heartfelt way about Britain’s historical and cultural ties. Bruges was a moderate speech.

Thatcher didn’t know it at the time, but she herself had but two years left as premier. Her party leaders turned on her in 1990. So how did her thinking go after that? It happens that there is a riveting clue being linked now on the internet (and above). It features remarks that Mrs. Thatcher delivered to a Conservative Party rally at Plymouth, where she lit into the prime minister at the time, Labor’s Tony Blair.

The leader of the Conservative opposition, Wm. Hague, did grasp what he called the Labor government’s “contempt for the views of the people it governs.” Quoth he: “Talk about Europe and they call you extreme. Talk about tax and they call you greedy. Talk about crime and they call you reactionary. Talk about immigration and they call you racist. Talk about your nation, and they call you Little Englanders.”

Yet Mr. Hague was not prepared to take a hard line on Europe. That fell to Thatcher, when she spoke at Plymouth. She did endorse Mr. Hague. Her focus, though, was excoriating Mr. Blair, and his Labor government, for wanting to “lead in Europe.” She warned that he would “lead Britain by the nose into the single currency,” fairly shouting about Mr. Blair: “He’s prepared to do it.”

“I would never be prepared to give up our own currency,” Thatcher fairly bellowed, and then the famous words: “The greatest issue in this election, indeed the greatest issue before our country, is whether Britain is to remain a free, independent, nation state. Or whether we are to be dissolved in a federal Europe. There are no half measures, no third ways — and no second choices.”

“Too many powers have already passed from our Parliament to the bureaucracy in Brussels,” Thatcher added. “We must get them back.”

She dilated on the pound, to surrender which, she reckoned, would be “to surrender our power of self-government, would betray all that past generations down the ages lived and died to defend. It would also be to turn our back on America, leader of the English-speaking peoples, to whom Europe — let’s remember — also owes its freedom. That is not our way.”

“And where better to take a stand than here in Plymouth?” Thatcher asked. “Plymouth — England’s historic opening to the world. Plymouth — from where Francis Drake, Walter Raleigh, and Captain Cook set out to take the ways of these islands to the uttermost bounds of the earth? Plymouth, from where the Pilgrim Fathers left in that cockle-shell vessel on a voyage which would create the most powerful force for freedom that the world has known?”

Please forgive the long quotes. They strike us as exactly right as Brexit goes down to the wire. We’ve covered this for close to 40 years, and we don’t nurse the slightest doubt about what Margaret Thatcher would have done. She’d have held out for independence, deal or no deal with Europe (or Ireland) and looked to America, Canada, and the other freedom countries as the way forward. Let Mrs. May and her fellow Tories be inspired by the words of the Iron Lady.