Jean-Claude Juncker says the UK's former chancellor was the key reason the fledgling single currency survived

Ken Clarke, the coalition's justice minister, is today named as the man who saved the euro project from meltdown in the early 1990s.

According to Jean-Claude Juncker, the current president of the eurogroup, Clarke – then Tory chancellor and scourge of his party's Eurosceptics – argued persuasively for the retention of the single currency and was the key reason it survived.

Back in the summer of 1993, the pre-euro system of tethering the continent's currencies together was creaking badly under the strain of the German Bundesbank's rigour. Infamously, Britain had already bailed out the previous September on Black Wednesday, wrecking the career of chancellor Norman Lamont. Now France was also on the brink and planning a coup, according to Juncker, then Luxembourg's finance minister.

"It was the day after King Baudouin of Belgium died, a Sunday, a secret meeting," he says. The king died on 31 July that year. "The French tried to get Germany and the Dutch kicked out of the EMS [European monetary system] and to take control of the rest. I told them that Luxembourg would also quit."

Clarke, three months into the job of chancellor after succeeding Lamont, would have none of it and rode to Europe's rescue, Juncker says in an interview published on Saturday in Munich's Süddeutsche Zeitung.

"Clarke came and organised an even smaller secret meeting. If you go, he told me, everything will collapse. You will never get this thing again. There will be no currency union. But I would like that we can join it one day."

Clarke's starring role in resuscitating the infant euro left a lasting impression on Juncker, who has attended more than 90 EU summits and is a walking encyclopaedia on European politics.

The Luxembourger, who also chairs the eurogroup of the 17 countries in the single currency, appears convinced that the UK will eventually see the light.

"In the long-term thinking of the British, joining the euro is an issue," he contends. "The UK will introduce the euro. On the day that the British realise that the pound is a regional currency without any international influence, they will join."