British election in 1988, not 1987?

The Tories actually had a clear lead in most of the polls from beginning of the Major premiership until the end of the Gulf War.

Possibly - I'm going from memory, but I have a spreadsheet and graphs at home. I know even with Major, Labour went back into the lead soon after the Gulf War and kept it for most of 1991.

But yeah I think Heseltine would have gotten them about 5 extra points initially; he would have been seen as a bigger change than Major and would have appealed more to Lib Dem voters.

I think initially might be an important qualification - I don't believe Heseltine would have campaigned as well as Major did in 1992, so I'm not sure he could have sustained the advantage.

As for a 1988 election, I don't see many plausible reasons for Thatcher panning out that parliament to it's very end. But possibly a poorer showing in the May '87 local elections?

Yeah, she took the '83 and '87 locals as weathervanes and then decided wether or not to call a general. There were a couple of scandals that broke later in 1987, that might have given her cold feet if they'd broken before May and hurt Tory support.
 
When are they going to repeal that? I'm British myself, and I was appalled when they introduced that bill to more or less no media coverage at all. What news is there on the repeal?

Contrary to Gregg, I believe Labour will repeal it come 2015. It's a messy, counter-parliamentary measure that serves only the present coalition. To leave it on the books is just inefficient.
 
Contrary to Gregg, I believe Labour will repeal it come 2015. It's a messy, counter-parliamentary measure that serves only the present coalition. To leave it on the books is just inefficient.

Possibly of relevance to this debate, introducing fixed terms was actually in Labour's manifesto in 1992. :D

I hope Labour won't repeal it - though I also hope they will reduce it to 4 years - but it's quite possible they will, I don't know. But I do personally think it's wrong that a sitting PM can call an election at the time he considers most advantageous to himself. Labour wanted it in 1992 because the unpredictability of the date of that election had kept the party in high gear for too long a time.
 
Why would she do that, though? She supported the Single European Act and when she was still involved in negotiations for Maastricht, she saw the treaty as forcing the rest of Europe to do the same things she'd done to Britain. She only began criticising the Maastricht Treaty after Black Wednesday. On Maastricht as much as the Poll Tax, you have to assume she'd somehow become capable of reversing herself whilst she was still PM.

And she was hated by the public and by a sizeable minority in her party. She still is - though I think the hatred would be much more diminished today if the public had been given the opportunity to vote her out itself, and so excised some of those demons.
Well IOTL Thatcher became far more eurosceptic by the end of her premiership, which is why Lawson resigned. If you have the adviser in her ear about it for a bit longer, you could see her turning fully eurosceptic - she already opposed the ERM, so opposing a Maastricht Treaty,or even having a referendum on the issue, is highly plausible.
 
Well IOTL Thatcher became far more eurosceptic by the end of her premiership, which is why Lawson resigned. If you have the adviser in her ear about it for a bit longer, you could see her turning fully eurosceptic - she already opposed the ERM, so opposing a Maastricht Treaty,or even having a referendum on the issue, is highly plausible.

Yes, and as we see today, referendum promises are a big vote-winner for the Tories.
 
Well IOTL Thatcher became far more eurosceptic by the end of her premiership, which is why Lawson resigned. If you have the adviser in her ear about it for a bit longer, you could see her turning fully eurosceptic - she already opposed the ERM, so opposing a Maastricht Treaty,or even having a referendum on the issue, is highly plausible.

But she didn't oppose ERM as long as she believed it would restrain inflation. She didn't oppose Europe as long as she believed it would restrain inflation. She was sceptical, perhaps, but not opposed - Black Wednesday significantly changed things. If she gets the same concessions that Major did on Maastricht (the same opt-outs, and the same commitment that a single currency will be set up on German ordo-liberal/social-market model rather than the more integrationist model favoured by the French), I can't see her opposing it.

And if she does come down against Europe and against Maastricht, that's likely to lead to a lot of resignations from her government and a lot of votes lost to the Liberals. Again, before Black Wednesday Euroscepticism had much less credibility and much less popularity; chasing pro-Europeans away isn't particularly likely to help her electoral fortunes - she isn't going to win-over any votes that Major didn't get in 1992, she is going to lose some of the votes he got.
 
But she didn't oppose ERM as long as she believed it would restrain inflation.

Well, she was bounced into it by Lawson and Howe, who threatened to resign over it. She never really believed in it in principle that I'm aware of. It's right to identify her growing scepticism towards the end of her tenure, but it's also right to question why people believe this would be a great electoral positive for her. It wouldn't.
 
Well, she was bounced into it by Lawson and Howe, who threatened to resign over it. She never really believed in it in principle that I'm aware of. It's right to identify her growing scepticism towards the end of her tenure, but it's also right to question why people believe this would be a great electoral positive for her. It wouldn't.

Granted, she absolutely did not believe in it in principle - but she was willing to tolerate it as long as it seemed to control or help control inflation as Lawson, Major etc said it would. She did believe in controlling inflation in principle, and would support the things she could be persuaded would help do that.

Edit: I'm also somewhat sceptical about the idea that she was bounced into it by resignation threats. Maybe it's just the way the sequence of events has been presented, but I can't really believe that a threat of resignation was troubling enough to get her to take the nation into the ERM (a massive decision) but not troubling enough to get her to ditch Alan Walters (a little local difficulty). Perhaps she had some kind of strategic long-game planned, that made the major fiscal change acceptable but not the minor staffing one; but the account feels like revisionism (perhaps on both sides) to me.
 
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Seems a fairly blunt way of assessing things to weight the basic issues of Walters and ERM in isolation.

On ERM she was pushing against a big head of steam in the Treasury and the government, and the possibility of multiple threatened resignations. I'm not even sure Lawson threatened resignation over the removal of Walters or not (I think he did, but I'm not entirely sure) but even if he did, his stock was declining by that point due to changing economic performance and he could be brushed off. No-one was going to die in a ditch for Nigel Lawson; economic policy (and cabinet government) itself was a different issue. Tbh I suspect there was a partial 'jumping before I'm pushed' aspect to Lawson's resignation - Howe after all was demoted soon after.
 
Seems a fairly blunt way of assessing things to weight the basic issues of Walters and ERM in isolation.

Fair comment, and your analysis seems spot on and extremely perspicacious. I'm just inclined to worry that a lot of the history we have derives from personal memoirs, and that such things are subject to a lot of post hoc self-justification and distortion.
 
I agree, I forget which autobiography it was (either David Owen or Cecil Parkinson's), but the book essentially mentioned the idea that Heseltine and Lawson had resigned so that they could avoid being sidelined, forgotten about and then removed from government like Thatcher did with earlier internal opponents to her policy, although both are more sympathetic to Thatcher's view of the events so perhaps it should be taken with a grain of salt.
 
Fair comment, and your analysis seems spot on and extremely perspicacious. I'm just inclined to worry that a lot of the history we have derives from personal memoirs, and that such things are subject to a lot of post hoc self-justification and distortion.

I honestly make a point of never reading autobiographies or memoirs. I'm not even sure I've ever actually read one. They are just exercises in exculpatory self-vindication. And you only ever get one part of the picture. As such I've never really seen the point in reading them. Just pick up a serious biography or piece of political history and you gain so much more.
 
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