Thatcher Suffers a Setback as Liberal Democrats Take Key Seat

Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative Party suffered a political setback Friday, losing a House of Commons seat in one of its traditional strongholds to the minority Liberal Democrats in a special election.

The reversal in a southern England seat held continuously by Conservatives since 1906 surprised party leaders and could mean a delay in the national election that Thatcher had hoped to call sometime next year.

It was also considered a personal rebuff to Thatcher because the seat was held previously by Ian Gow, a close friend and political soul mate who was killed by the Irish Republican Army in a car-bomb attack in July.

David Bellotti, the Liberal Democrat candidate, won 51% of the vote to 41% for Richard Hickmet, the Conservative, in Thursday’s balloting, the results of which were announced early Friday.

The candidate of the opposition Labor Party took just over 5%, barely enough to win a refund of the bond that all candidates are required to post when declaring for office.

It was a swing of 20% against the Conservatives, who captured the seat with 60% of the vote just three years ago.

British parliamentary special elections are notoriously fickle affairs because they allow voters to send a protest message to the ruling party without actually voting it out of office.

The Conservatives, who hold a 100-seat majority in the 650-member House of Commons, could take some solace from an exit poll indicating that had this been a regular election contest, their candidate would have won.

Nonetheless, politicians and analysts agreed that the loss of the Eastbourne seat is an important setback for Thatcher and that it indicates deep public distress with the government’s handling of the economy, its plans to reform the National Health Service and its imposition of a new system of local taxation known as the poll tax.

Britain’s annual inflation rate is nearly 11%, and interest rates, although lowered recently by a point, remain at 14%.

Thatcher last week had mocked as “a dead parrot” the Liberal Democrats, who are seeking to emerge as a third force from the ashes of the defunct alliance of the old Liberal and Social Democratic parties.