Thatcher’s Tories Lose Shocker in Local Race

In a stunning defeat for Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who derided it last week as a “dead parrot,” the centrist Liberal Democratic Party today won this Conservative Party stronghold in a special parliamentary election.

The Liberal Democrats took Eastbourne, a prosperous southern England coastal town, in a huge 20.5% swing against the government. Balloting was to replace a legislator slain by the Irish Republican Army.

The Tory trouncing was among the worst electoral setbacks suffered by Thatcher since she came to power in 1979. It prompted speculation she might feel forced to shelve any plan to call a general election next year, a year before her third five-year term expires.

Still, the result had scant impact on Thatcher’s control of the 650-member House of Commons, where the Conservatives have 373 seats, Labor 226 and the Liberal Democrats now have 20.

The rest are split among minority regional parties.

The victory by Liberal Democrat David Bellotti, 47, appeared in part to be a backlash to the Tory campaign theme that a vote for the opposition would be “a moral victory for terrorism.”

It also marked a revolt against government economic policies of trying to squeeze 10.9% inflation with nearly two years of high interest rates and an unpopular new local tax imposed in the spring. Critics also pointed to what they have said is under-funding of health, education and welfare services.

“It is a very poor result for us; there are no bones about it,” Conservative Party Chairman Kenneth Baker acknowledged when the result of Thursday’s ballot was declared early today.

Bellotti, scooping 51% of the vote, overturned a nearly 17,000-voter Conservative majority in Eastbourne to win by a comfortable 4,550-vote margin.

The Conservatives’ Richard Hickmet went down with 18,865 votes.

The vote for the socialist Labor Party, with a yearlong lead in national opinion polls but no hope in Eastbourne, collapsed to just 2,308, or 5%.

Eastbourne had been Tory territory for more than 70 years and ranked among the dozen safest Conservative Party seats in the country.