Thatcher in Dorset

No one was indifferent about Margaret Thatcher.

And many of the key dramas in the tumultuous years of her premiership were played out in Dorset.

These were the days when barely a year went by without a major party political conference in Bournemouth. Conservative gatherings were more often characterised by standing ovations than angry debate, but they always made headlines.

Margaret Thatcher once said she had been a visitor to the resort since her twins, Carol and Mark, were small. She visited in her role as education secretary in 1971, calling in at Portchester School in Bournemouth.

She deposed Edward Heath as leader of the opposition three years later in a move that stunned the political world.

In 1977, Bournemouth found itself at the centre of national attention after the MP for Bournemouth East MP, John Cordle, resigned and a by-election was called.

Margaret Thatcher campaigned for a full day in the town in support of Conservative candidate David Atkinson.

The by-election result, which saw the Liberal Party slip to third place, was credited with bringing about the end of the Lib-Lab pact that was sustaining Prime Minister James Callaghan in office. His government held on to power until a confidence vote in 1979 brought about a general election and the arrival of Britain’s first woman Prime Minister.

Controversy marked Mrs Thatcher’s premiership from its earliest days. In the spring of 1980, 3,000 hospital workers demonstrated outside the Tory Central Council conference in Bournemouth.

At the beginning of the 1980s, her poll ratings were disastrous.

But the Falklands War in 1982 reversed her fortunes dramatically.

When she visited Dorset in July 1982, she was still met with protests – but also with adulation.

That visit included trips to Hamworthy’s Marine base and to Wimborne company Flight Refuelling to thank people for their part in the Falklands victory. She also visited the RNLI, Blandford Conservative Club and Marden-Edwards in Ferndown.

Labour, which suffered its worst-ever election result in the general election of 1983, was at the beginning of a long journey towards electability. In 1985, its leader Neil Kinnock used his party’s conference in Bournemouth to face down his own opponents on the hard left.

Margaret Thatcher had no such worries. Her conference speech in Bournemouth the following year was greeted by a seven-minute standing ovation.

In that speech, she confidently attacked Labour’s defence policy, the trade union movement and the education system, which she said had been “infiltrated by a permissive philosophy of self-expression”.

The speech set out Mrs Thatcher’s stall ahead of another convincing election victory the following year. But that electoral triumph was to be her last.

By the time she returned to the resort for the Tories’ autumn conference in 1990, she had been through the resignation of a chancellor and a leadership challenge from the “stalking horse” Sir Anthony Meyer. The Tories were now 14 per cent behind Labour in the polls.

She still dominated that conference, posing for photo opportunities in the resort and riding the land train. And her conference speech was one of the few to contain a memorable joke, likening the ailing Liberal Democrats to Monty Python’s dead parrot.

But within weeks, the resignation of her deputy Sir Geoffrey Howe would bring on another leadership challenge from Michael Heseltine.

Echo pictures from that October show Mrs Thatcher applauding her chancellor, John Major. No one would have bet that within weeks, he would have succeeded her as PM.