Thatcher’s Critique of Major Disputed : Britain: The Tories come to the defense of the prime minister after the former leader accuses him of taking her successes as his own.

Conservative Party leaders reacted angrily Tuesday to former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s published remarks that her successor, John Major, was not “his own man.”

Thatcher’s strong statements, published in Newsweek magazine under her byline, seemed to take personal credit for the Tory policies that resulted in Major’s election April 9.

“I don’t accept the idea that all of a sudden Major is his own man,” she wrote. “He has been prime minister for 17 months, and he inherited all these great achievements of the past 11 1/2 years which have fundamentally changed Britain.”

Thatcher spoke of her many accomplishments as Britain’s first woman prime minister and the longest-serving in this century.

The prime minister’s office maintained a stony silence over her remarks, including the assertion that “there isn’t such a thing as Majorism.”

“There couldn’t be, at the moment,” she said. “My colleagues and I turned round the whole philosophy of government. . . . Mr. Major has accepted these principles, written them in his manifesto, held it up and said, ‘It’s all me.’ What he means is that the things put in there were his choice. So I believe he will take that legacy forward.”

The former Conservative Party leader, who was overthrown by Tory members of Parliament in November, 1990, because her overbearing manner was considered dangerous to the party’s electoral chances, declared: “Thatcherism will live. It will live long after Thatcher has died, because we had the courage to restore the great principles and put them into practice.”

Officials at 10 Downing St. were privately reported to be angered by the remarks. And Tory politicians were furious at what they considered a calculated put-down of her successor.

Member of Parliament William Powell denounced Thatcher’s remarks as “intemperate, ill-judged and fundamentally wrong.”

He told BBC Radio: “Her whole analysis is quite extraordinary. What won the election was Conservative policy. This whole article reeks of the kind of triumphalism which people found so objectionable in Mrs. Thatcher. I have a marginal seat (in the House of Commons), and if we had had her as leader, I know I could not possibly have won that seat.”