John Major, Britain's prime minister [...] committed his government to shunning 'the soft option, the devaluer's option that would be a betrayal of our future and our children's future'. It was the signal speculators needed, with George Soros famously ahead of the pack, to take the British government to the cleaner's: a once-in-a-century opportunity to profit from a commitment to an exchange rate with the Deutsche Mark that the Bundesbank had signalled it would not defend. [...]
I vaguely remember reading a long-form journalistic piece about it several years back, but at the time I didn't know much about the history of the European Union or anything so it's cool to revisit it with that context in mind