PERSPECTIVE ON BRITAIN : Lies and Plots Encircle a Fighter : The vote delivers an undeserved damning blow to Thatcher and sets the nation on an uncertain path.

Conservative members of the British Parliament have justly been called the world’s most dishonest electorate. Tuesday, after a week of peculiarly British lies and plots, they delivered a damning blow against the woman who has transformed their country and their own political prospects over the past decade.

It is not clear how far this was intentional. The MPs did not vote decisively to sack Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher but merely gave her insufficient backing to beat off challenger Michael Heseltine on the first ballot. Since many had previously committed themselves to both sides, and most had given up trying to remember the last untruth they had told about their voting intentions, the meaning of the result may be hazy until the second ballot next Tuesday.

But meanwhile the future direction of Britain is more uncertain than at any time since Thatcher won power in 1979. The lightness with which Thatcher has been treated has properly appalled her admirers both in Britain and abroad.

The philosophical choice Tuesday was a clear one--between a proven fighter for free markets, private enterprise and a Europe of free and independent nations and a man who stands for greater government intervention in the economy, a bigger social role for the state and more decisions about the nations of Europe made centrally in Brussels.

Both are conservatives. But, while Thatcher could always be relied on to restrict public intervention and foreign encroachment as far as possible, Heseltine likes his politics a la carte . She had the conviction to free Britain from trade union domination and to drive the Argentines out of the Falkland Islands when neither was a fashionable cause. He is a picker and a chooser among the policies in the chic political shop windows, a natural compromiser and dealmaker. Thatcher is an instinctive Atlanticist, sometimes sentimentally so. Heseltine is a pragmatist who will take what he sees to be the best partner for the time.

Officials in Washington have affected a conscious lack of interest in the contest. Some of Secretary of State James A. Baker’s men positively relish the idea of a British leader whose views on closer European integration and propensity to negotiate the gulf crisis seem so much closer to their own.

But, whatever the MPs may later claim, their decision Tuesday was not made on grounds of any philosophy at all. The boundaries of freedom and Britain’s role in Europe were not the issues that resounded around the wood-and-plastic House of Commons tearooms where this most exclusive of electorates likes to meet.

The question was simple: Would more of them hold their seats and high offices at the next election with Thatcher as leader or with someone else?

Such cynicism is likely to get the answer it deserves--a rejection by the electorate of whomever the Conservatives choose. Heseltine is not a popular man in his party. Like Thatcher, he is thought to have too many ideas.

Conservative MPs have spent a decade being dragged behind a successful leader whom most of them disliked. They would rather spend the next decade with someone closer to the mudded mainstream.

Heseltine stormed out of Thatcher’s cabinet in 1986 because he was not allowed to force the Westland Helicopter company to choose a European rather than an American partner for a defense project. Before that he had become known as Tarzan for his flowing blond hair, his flailing oratory and his twirling of the golden House of Commons mace in a parliamentary temper.

He is not naturally dull. Only in his bid to reach the top has he made himself a dogged party man. In exile, he has aped the Richard Nixon of the 1960s, using his enormous self-made wealth and free time to tramp the country to speak on behalf of colleagues, eat bad food and store up political favors for the future. Tuesday he called in his markers, and although he did not win outright, he will hope that in next week’s second ballot he can deliver the coup de grace .

Thatcher needed 50% of the vote plus 15% more than Heseltine. She failed by two votes to win an outright victory. By next week, when she and Heseltine have said that they will face the same voters again, others may have entered the fight to win what will then be only a majority vote. If no one succeeds, a third ballot will allow second and third preferences to be taken into account until a winner is found.

This electoral system is a bizarre one, designed to improve upon the secret devices by which Sir Alec Douglas-Home replaced the ailing Harold Macmillan as prime minister in 1963. It is a small improvement upon that, but to the British public and Thatcher’s many admirers abroad, an electoral coup is no way to treat a prime minister who is at the center of an international alliance in the Persian Gulf, and who, at least until Tuesday, was willing to continue in office until the full British electorate had a chance to defeat her.