Margaret Thatcher papers reveal how close Tories came to a split in 1981

http://www.guardian.co.uk/politics/2012/mar/17/margaret-thatcher-papers-tory-split

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The autumn of 1981 brought Margaret Thatcher's darkest hour. Riots in Brixton and Toxteth had sent her personal ratings plunging below even those of Michael Foot, and she became the least popular prime minister in polling history.

Now Thatcher's personal papers for 1981, released on Saturday, show how close the Conservative party came to splitting in the face of "brutal in-fighting" in Thatcher's inner circle, and the apparently unstoppable rise of the newly founded Social Democratic party.

Open criticism from leading cabinet "wets", such as Ian Gilmour, as well as the "blue chip" group of younger, leftish Tory MPs led by Chris Patten, is well known – but the threat of revolt from a group labelled by Thatcher's inner circle as the "gang of 25" has not come to light before.

The papers, published by the Margaret Thatcher Foundation at the Churchill archives centre in Cambridge, show the Conservative research department told the prime minister that the SDP-Liberal alliance – formed after the gang of four of Roy Jenkins, David Owen, Shirley Williams and Bill Rodgers split from Labour – might bury the old Labour party.

It added that the "electoral and polling evidence suggests [the alliance] threatens also to sweep the Conservative party into a small minority position worse than anything we have experienced for over 100 years".

Chris Collins, of the Thatcher Foundation, says the papers show the prospect of a split became even more real when, on 25 November, a group of 25 Tory backbenchers signed a letter to the chief whip, Michael Jopling, warning they would vote together against any further "anti-deflationary" economic measures in the autumn statement.

Only one Tory MP, Christopher Brocklebank-Fowler, had by then defected to the SDP. There was speculation that at least four liberal Tory MPs – Robin Hicks, Stephen Dorrell, Hugh Dykes and David Knox – were actively talking to the SDP at the time.

All four were among the "gang of 25", which also included Patrick Cormack, Charles Morrison, Julian Critchley, Ian Gilmour and Anthony Meyer, who later stood as the "stalking horse" leadership candidate against Thatcher in 1989.

There was particular anxiety about Dorrell, a future cabinet minister under John Major, and Jopling got an assurance from him in the "plainest possible terms" that he would not join the SDP. Dorrell, Patten and Tristan Garel-Jones were invited to "bridge-building" drinks in Thatcher's Commons office, but to little effect.

A week later, on 4 December, the chief whip wrote to Thatcher telling her things had got even worse. There were now a further 20, including Brian Mawhinney, Norman St John-Stevas and Ted Heath, who were planning to join a mass abstention on the key vote: "We have got far more dissidents than I expected, and some are very unhappy indeed … We are facing a very serious situation which we must discuss," Jopling told her.

Ian Gow, Thatcher's parliamentary private secretary and political confidant, swiftly organised a counteroffensive with the Treasury ministers Geoffrey Howe and Leon Brittan, seeing each of the dissidents in turn.

But in an indication of the poisoned atmosphere within the highest reaches of the Tory government of the time, Gow went behind Jopling's back to accuse him in a note to Thatcher of both overplaying the potential rebellion, and more seriously, of "not being one of us": "Michael, though an outstanding chief whip, does not share our conviction. Like the original 25, he, in his heart, favours reflation and foresees the deepest difficulty for our party if the budget is not reflationary. I take the opposite view. In my opinion, the gravest danger for our country is if we follow our predecessors, and lose our nerve," he told her.

Fourteen Tories went on to abstain in the vote, including 11 of the "gang of 25".

The Thatcher papers also give an earlier example in 1981 of what the foundation calls "brutal in-fighting" when, immediately after the riots, a party election broadcast script by John Selwyn-Gummer was damned by John Hoskyns, the head of the No 10 policy unit, as "the worst example of platitude-laden undeliverable cliches and nonsense that I have ever seen ... it is terrible".

He loudly told Gow in front of Thatcher: "Why can't you just stop these fucking stupid arguments?" When he later apologised, she told him: "I'm quite accustomed to it."

An indication of the battering she took came in an end-of-year note from Gow, who warned her not to mistake the views of the "gang of 25" for those of the party or nation, and that as a "giant amongst pygmies", her determination deserved to succeed. "Whether that iron resolve will be sufficient, we do not know," Gow said, somewhat uncertainly. The battering was to continue for at least another four months, until the outbreak of the Falklands war restored her political fortunes.

The only commentator at that time to be predicting a 1983 Tory election victory was Old Moore's Almanack.

The files show that one of the few letters Thatcher received empathising with her plight was from a West Country pensioner. "As a survivor of the SS Titanic at the age of three … I hope that you too will be a survivor," wrote William Richards, 72, of Carbis Bay, Cornwall.

Anyone for Denis?<br />

Margaret and Denis Thatcher approached a charity performance of the play Anyone for Denis?<em> </em>through gritted teeth.

A letter setting out the arrangements, including an inquiry whether its star, Angela Thorne, could be allowed to wear the same outfit as the prime minister, was met with no fewer than five prime ministerial noes in the margin – something of a record even for Thatcher.

Denis's plea to be "allowed to go home" instead of attending the ordeal was overruled.

Afterwards, Thatcher had an exchange of letters with Thorne in which both women confessed to finding the whole thing an ordeal: "Attending the performance got far more publicity than the other things I do," she told Thorne. But when a fortnight later a Downing Street staffer unwisely inserted an "anyone for Denis?" joke in a draft speech for her, it was struck out.

Memento of Reagan<br />

<br />When President Ronald Reagan left a page of doodles on the table during the Ottawa G7 summit in July 1981, Margaret Thatcher, who was sitting next to Reagan, picked it up and carefully filed it away in the flat at No 10.

Chris Collins of the Thatcher Foundation, said the doodles seem to include a self-portrait of Reagan's head and torso saying that he was famously fit. "It shows how bored he was," he added.