Thatcher Assailed for Criticizing Major’s EC Stand : Britain: Conservatives fire back at the former prime minister. She’s accused of living in the past.

Leading members of the Conservative Party launched a scathing counterattack Saturday against Margaret Thatcher after she criticized the government of Prime Minister John Major for its stand on Europe.

Former Cabinet minister Norman Fowler, a close political ally of Major, said former Prime Minister Thatcher’s actions could cost the Tories the next national election.

Senior Conservative politicians said Thatcher seemed determined to disrupt the party over Major’s approach to next month’s summit of the European Community and that her remarks were calculated to damage his position there.

Thatcher “seems finally to have flipped,” said Hugh Dykes, chairman of the European Movement and a Tory member of Parliament.

“She opposed a referendum for years. The Second World War itself was decided by Parliament. That is our system,” he said. “It is outrageous to see her being so disloyal to ‘her prime minister.’ ”

Dykes said that Thatcher and her chief parliamentary supporter, former Cabinet member Norman Tebbit, were living in the past. “They are scaring the British people, who are concentrating on the future for a strong country in a united Europe,” he added.

The row began when Thatcher, during a major parliamentary debate Wednesday, said that decisions made about Britain’s participation in new EC treaties on political and economic union should be ratified in a national referendum.

Major has opposed the referendum form of political action on grounds that it is superfluous in a parliamentary democracy.

Late Friday, on the anniversary of her ouster from power by fellow Tory members of Parliament, Thatcher denounced Major’s view as “arrogant and wrong.”

“Parliamentary supremacy is the supremacy of the voice of the people,” she said. “If you deny that (the people’s voice) to be heard, I think it is arrogant and I think it is wrong.”

However, Thatcher did not admit that during her dozen years as prime minister she firmly opposed referendums on major issues.

For months, Tory leaders have been nervous about the support the government would ultimately receive from Thatcher once she turned her attention again to British politics and the European Community. The fear was that she could divide the party in a close election.

Now, political observers say, party leaders have decided to fight her broadsides with return fire.

While Major kept a discreet silence, Fowler led the counterattack in a Saturday television interview.

“It makes me very angry,” said Fowler, who is chairman of the Tory Foreign Affairs Committee. “What I say to Mrs. Thatcher is that if she goes on like this, she is going to lose us the election.”

Parliament member Terry Dicks added: “She is misleading people, because she has never been in favor of a referendum before. Those words--being ‘arrogant’ and ‘wrong’--apply more to her than ever they do to John Major. She is beginning to sound in her behavior like Ted Heath in skirts.”

Thatcher had often accused Edward (Ted) Heath, her Tory predecessor as prime minister, of disloyalty and sniping at her from the sidelines.

Marcus Fox, another Tory Parliament member, weighed in with the remark that it was “breathtaking arrogance on her part” to use such language about Major.

“I do not enjoy saying this, but her influence is going to diminish if she continues down this road. I do not think there is any demand of any size for a referendum. She ought to think more carefully about this aspect of policy.

“We do not want her to be a sort of figurehead, which she thinks she can be, in keeping some sort of revolt going on our benches. The answer is that, so far as any support is concerned for her policies, it is minuscule.”

Meanwhile, John Smith, the opposition Labor Party’s economics spokesman, commented: “It is very revealing how deep the split is in the Conservative Party. It goes right to the heart of the matter. The prime minister is caught in the hapless position of having so many back-seat drivers, he does not know where he is going.”