Clarke rages at ‘disloyal and out of date’ Thatcher

Kenneth Clarke waded into Margaret Thatcher today hours after she condemned him as a “has-been” who would take the Tories to disaster if he won the leadership.

Mr Clarke in turn described the former Prime Minister as disloyal, divisive, out of date and out of touch.

He accused her of conspiring with the Eurosceptics to destroy the government of her successor, John Major, declaring: “Mrs Thatcher was more disloyal to John Major than Ted Heath ever was to Mrs Thatcher.”

He derided the way she tried each year to “hijack the Tory conference from whoever is leader of the day” to diminishing applause from the rank and file. “It’s quite something to face Mrs Thatcher at your door breathing fire, coming in to threaten you, and it does have a disturbing effect.

“But there are many people in the Conservative Party who wish to be liberated from the kind of thing that, I am afraid, Mrs Thatcher is trying to get us to go back to in her intervention today.”

The former Chancellor also turned on his leadership rival, Iain Duncan Smith, describing him as the heir-elect of the Tory “hard Right” sponsored by Lady Thatcher and Norman Tebbit.

As the temperature rose, Lady Thatcher’s old foe Michael Hesel-tine weighed in, charging that she was ready to back any candidate to bar Mr Clarke s way. It’s a re-run of the William Hague situation, he said. Margaret is determined to use what influence she has to stop Ken Clarke. That is the issue.

Lord Heseltine added: Is Margaret’s endorsement going to help the generation of younger people that we have got to attract back? I don’t think myself that is the case.

Shadow home secretary Ann Widdecombe, another Clarke supporter, joined the attack, saying Lady Thatcher’s powers of clairvoyance were not what they used to be.

Although Lady Thatcher was out-spoken in her attack on Mr Clarke in a letter in today’s Daily Telegraph, his barbed response pushes the party to the brink of all-out civil war.

Speaking on the BBC’s Today programme, he said he was not surprised by Lady Thatcher’s endorsement of his Right-wing rival. He said that “nothing is more likely to turn away young people and floating voters than the idea that we are going for the kind of agenda that Mrs Thatcher seems determined to force on us.”

In her letter, Lady Thatcher says that if Mr Clarke were to win, the party would be left split down the middle or wholly dishonest – “either openly rebelling against him or going along with policies they knew to be wrong”.

She lays blame at Mr Clarke’s door for the “mistakes” in the Nineties which led the party in 1997 to the greatest defeat in its history.

“Indeed, I simply do not understand how Ken could lead today’s Conservative Party to anything other than disaster,” she says.

Despite his vigorous response, Mr Clarke looked in difficulties as never before after both Mr Hague and Lady Thatcher spoke up for his opponent – and after revealing that if he won the leadership one of his first acts would be to stay away from the Commons to duck a critical vote on Europe.

The blows fell at a critical time, as ballot papers went out to the more than 300,000 party members who will now vote to pick the new leader.

Mr Clarke today seeks to steer the leadership debate away from Europe with a speech on the economy warning that Britain is on the brink of a serious downturn and accusing Chancellor Gordon Brown of complacency.

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