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Maggie's worst enemy

The 1984 Brighton bomb forced Margaret Thatcher to tear up what would have been the most divisive speech of her premiership, in which she planned to accuse not only militant miners but the entire Labour party of being 'the enemy within' and part of an 'insurrection' against democracy.”

Reports of Thatcher’s infamous 'enemy within' speech, delivered in private to the Conservative backbench 1922 committee the previous July, provoked widespread outrage, because she had appeared to say Britain’s mining communities were as dangerous an enemy as the Argentinian dictator General Galtieri had been over the Falklands.

Now the draft transcripts of the discarded conference speech reveal that, far from regretting using the phrase 'enemy within', which she had only used previously used in private, the Tory prime minister was quite prepared, in the middle of the bitter 1984-85 miners’ strike, to repeat it publicly – and widen it to include nearly the whole of the Labour movement.

The opening of the planned speech - part of the Thatcher Papers archive at Churchill College, Cambridge - dispenses with usual conference niceties: 'From the dark cloud falls an acid rain that eats into liberty,' it begins. Thatcher was to go on to put Labour’s refusal to condemn the picket-line violence of the militant miners at the very heart of the problem, with influential men prepared to repudiate the ideas of parliamentary democracy and the rule of law. She was to claim that the Labour party was now the 'natural home' of these forces – which was why it was so muted in its condemnation of the violence and its praise of the police or working miners, and yet willing to trumpet the 'extreme cause' of Arthur Scargill’s leadership of the National Union of Mineworkers.”

The explosion of the IRA Brighton bomb, aimed at the heart of the cabinet, ensured that the attack was never delivered. The speech was hastily rewritten in the Brighton conference centre in the early morning, meaning that Thatcher’s most famous remark on the miners’ strike – 'the enemy within' – would be one that she never actually uttered in public.”


The only "dark cloud" that threatens Europe today, is her ghost:

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