Major Takes His Lumps in Thatcher Memoirs

Former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher’s long-awaited memoirs paint a less than flattering picture of her successor, John Major, but they level the harshest criticism against two onetime Cabinet ministers, excerpts published Sunday reveal.

The memoirs, serialized in the Sunday Times, prompted some of the strongest public language ever heard in the Conservative Party. The ministers skewered in the writings, Lord Geoffrey Howe and Lord Nigel Lawson, late Sunday dismissed Thatcher as an embittered woman seeking scapegoats for her own mistakes.

Howe had quit Thatcher’s Cabinet after many disagreements over Britain’s moves toward European unity and after suffering tongue-lashings from her in meetings.

Thatcher accused Howe, who served her as chancellor of the Exchequer, foreign secretary and leader of the House of Commons, of “bile and treachery” in his resignation speech to the Parliament.

Howe “deliberately set out to bring down a colleague in this brutal and public way,” wrote Thatcher, Britain’s prime minister from 1979 to 1990.

His bitter resignation speech paved the way for the challenge to her party leadership by Michael Heseltine, eventually resulting in Major’s election to head the Tories.

Thatcher accused Lawson, a former chancellor of the Exchequer who also resigned from her Cabinet, of “folly” in his handling of the currency exchange rate.

“Nigel had pursued a personal economic policy without reference to the rest of the government,” she said. “How could I possibly trust him again?”

On Sunday, Howe and Lawson hit back at Thatcher’s depictions, with Lawson calling them “cock and bull.”

“Perhaps the Thatcher picture has to be seen in the context of her downfall,” Lawson said. “That causes her, perhaps unfortunately, to disparage her successors to some extent and to try to find scapegoats among some of her close colleagues.”

Howe declared: “She finds it hard to praise even her favorites. She imputes malice to me in a way I cannot accept. My only sin is having worked together with her for 18 years, 14 of them as her partner.”

And Lord Dennis Healy, once a leading Labor Party Cabinet minister, said the memoirs showed that Thatcher was a “sour, peevish, embittered old woman with monstrous egoism, blaming everybody but herself.”

As for Major, Thatcher wrote that as a Cabinet minister, her successor appeared ill at ease with large ideas and “his tendency to accept the conventional wisdom had given me pause for thought.”

However, in an accompanying interview in the Sunday Times, she applauded Major’s performance at last week’s Conservative Party conference, saying that he had gone “out of his way to reaffirm Conservative principles” and that her legacy is now “much more secure.”