cumbria
Banned
The Sport???? If the Sport backed Maggie then there's a good chance that they would also have backed Ming the Merciless! The Sport is the paper of the undressed ladies with impressive attributes and the headlines like "WW2 bomber found on the moon!"
Why ignore the rest of the papers I mentioned?
I'm sorry, but I still think that your reasoning is faulty. Maggie seems to have split the Tories with no repercussions at all. That's just not going to be realistic.
They have been senior party members resign or be removed from the cabinet and many defections to the liberals.
Plus a host of deselections.
The Times may be owned by Murdoch, but it's always been more politically mature than the Sun and it would not have supported Maggie's actions over Europe. Hastings would have agonised over it but as a friend of Hurd, Clarke and Heseltine he would have written thundering editorials damning Thatcher's conduct.
You have a very naive view of how things operate.
Hastings would do as his boss tells him as all Murdochs newspaper men do.
As for the polling data, I think you're reading a little too much into it. Support for Europe as a whole remained fairly high, even though the Single Currency was controversial. Having Thatcher pull the UK out of Europe completely would have been seen as the final and overwhelming proof that Thatcher had gone barking mad.
I doubt the British population would see political independence as "Thatcher going barking mad" and with most the press onside as well as the Prime Minister opinion would very quickly turn to independence from the EEC.
There would have been massive resistance in the Cabinet and there would have been resignations that would have inflicted fatal political damage, causing a challenge to her leadership. Add on the recession and her handling of the NHS and you have bad poll numbers and a defeat at the election!
They has been resistence read the time line.
Poll numbers are also effected by the populist stances on the EEC, Immigration, Political Correctness, law and order, immigration, the gulf war etc.
All populist weapons Major lacked and he still won.
Finally the bit about the looney left things in the papers - by 1990 these were starting to ebb as Labour had finally put its house in order. Militant was dead.
Wasnt just Militant that was classed as the looney left but people like Livingstone and Bluncket and a host in inner city socialist councils with crazy politically correct ideas that appeared in the press almost daily back then.