How does thatcher revolt work

I made her know what the situation was and she then decided what she wanted to do. Many of Mrs Thatcher's supporters believe that this was bad advice and that if she had been given the chance to rally the support of her cabinet collectively, she could have survived. But instead she gave ministers the opportunity to tell her that she was losing support without facing the peer pressure of more loyal colleagues.

If she had fought on, the then-Chancellor John Major and Foreign Secretary Douglas Hurd would not have thrown their hats into the ring and she would have gone head-to-head with Michael Heseltine once again. Culture Secretary John Whittingdale, who was then Mrs Thatcher's political secretary, says the leader believed she could have won the second ballot but it would have come at too high a cost. Michael, now Lord, Heseltine reveals that after losing the first ballot, it never crossed his mind that he could stand aside - but he now admits he should have considered the option.

It was a year or so later that someone pointed out the option of saying 'I am not interested in winning on a technicality, I accept the verdict'. It did not occur to us to think of it. We should have done but didn't. I always believed I would be back. I never thought my political career was over, but I would not have created quite such animosity in the party. Lord Heseltine says that if Mrs Thatcher had decided to fight on, he might have beaten her: "It is possible I would have won, but not certain.

But I do know that when I heard that she was not going on, I knew there was no chance of me winning. Ken Clarke reveals that Mrs Thatcher tried to win his support by promising to stand down as prime minister before the election.

But during their one-on-one conversation, she insisted she could not go yet. There was no one else. She would go, she assured me. She was going to step down before the next election, but first of all she had to see us through this war against Iraq in Kuwait, and she had to get the economy back on its feet again. Lord Wakeham reveals the decisive role that Margaret's husband, Denis Thatcher, played in persuading his wife to resign.

Handwritten notes show her trying out the phrases about society and the enemy within — concerning all trade unions, not just the miners, against whom the phrase was eventually deployed four years later. The accounts of the speech's development bear out Hoskyns's recollection of Denis Thatcher telling his wife: "Honestly, love, we're not trying to write the Old Testament. The speech soft-pedalled on attacking Labour, then embarking on internecine strife, but the papers show how closely Downing Street monitored who might emerge as leader after James Callaghan, who resigned on 15 October.

Denis Healey was regarded as particularly formidable, being described as "the most powerful, the most dangerous and the most uncertain of the candidates" by Tory chairman Lord Thorneycroft.

Thatcher regarded the eventual winner, Michael Foot, with disdain. Gow reported back to Thatcher: "[He] says that his remaining political purpose is to ensure the re-election of the Conservative party at the next election because only by [that] will there come about the split in the Labour party which he considers to be the essential precondition for a real purge.

Thatcher could be discomforted by demonstrators. After being heckled in Salisbury, Wiltshire, in February , she wanted to call off a visit to nearby Calne when told locals had just lost their jobs.

Not another occasion like that! Nevertheless, the trip went ahead. The files are online at www. Despite political setbacks that left her trailing in some opinion polls, she was already thinking beyond the next election. Then in late October the issue of European integration, which Thatcher fiercely opposed but many in her party supported, blew up in her face, triggering a sequence of events that allowed two fellow Conservatives to bring her down.

Sir Geoffrey Howe, her mild-mannered, owlish former minister for finance and foreign affairs who believed deeply in European unity, was finally provoked to revolt by her dismissive rejection of integration at an EU summit in Rome.

The speech was couched in courteous terms - even with some cricket analogies. No one present doubted that Thatcher was in trouble. By the time the party voted a week later, many did indeed reconsider their own loyalty to her. Thatcher later conceded that she was overconfident and did not work hard enough to shore up her support.

When the vote was held on Tuesday, November 20, she was at a summit of big powers in Paris called to set a new world order after the Cold War. But it was instantly clear: she had failed to win outright on the first ballot, putting her control of the party in jeopardy.

Thatcher and her entourage hurried down the stairs and burst out into a small, cobbled courtyard, pushing a BBC correspondent away from a live microphone to address a knot of reporters as we waited for her response.