There has always been a gravity, drama and imposing physicality about Klapez's work which has fitted ill with the British art climate. Soon after his arrival in this country in 1987, he received some encouragement from Spectator art critic Giles Auty and the author, James Knox, co-founders of an organisation calling itself Art for Work, intended "to advise industrialists and financiers on commissioning works of art". This association helped procure Klapez some remunerative commissions, such as a two-figure group for the property company MEPC, called Unity (right), erected in the atrium of Alban Gate Towers on London Wall in 1992. This commission might have been an ode to Margaret Thatcher, who, shortly before the commission was given, had ceded party leadership to John Major. What MEPC had originally wanted was an enlarged version of the aspirational nude male figure which the sculptor had modelled for the Thatcher Award, described in the Times Diary as "the free enterprise equivalent to the Oscars". Although Klapez himself decided that this figure would be wrong for the space, his decision in favour of a two-figure group did not indicate any diminution of loyalty to the Iron Lady.
To a post-perestroika Croatian she has remained an object of high respect, but Klapez will never forget the flea-in-the-car he received for designing the Thatcher Award, from the artist known to this paper as The Margate Express for what to her seemed an apostasy from the liberal stance expected of a British artist in the 1990s.