City politicians recall the Thatcher era

As he has already publicly stated that he hopes the former Prime Minister burns in hell because “she was a witch”, the refusal of Bradford West’s Respect Party MP to contribute to the proceedings is hardly surprising.

For his part he says the “state-organised eulogy” is not a debate about the impact of Thatcherism.

“If it were a debate about the legacy of Margaret Thatcher, I would be the first in the queue for prayers,” he said, referring to the start of each session in the House of Commons. “I understand it is not a debate.”

Other Bradford MPs have already had their say about the sentiments expressed by Mr Galloway, who has successfully stolen a little of the Iron Lady’s thunder by diverting media attention to his feelings about her.

Whereas he never had personal dealings with Mrs Thatcher during her years of power between May 1979 and November 1990, Ronnie Farley did.

The former Bradford Conservative group leader met her on a number of occasions in London in the politically-volatile 1980s.

He said: “Her and I never got on because I was never ‘one of us’. We couldn’t run Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative policies in Bradford because we would have been wiped out.”

When his Conservative colleague Eric Pickles – now Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government – put in place a package of Thatcherite public spending cuts between 1988 and 1990, controversially employing the Lord Mayor’s second and casting vote to get them through full council, public anger was manifest.

The Conservatives lost power in Bradford for ten years and when they did make a come back under the leadership of Margaret Eaton and then Kris Hopkins it was only with the qualified support of Liberal Democrats.

Although political opinion in Bradford is broad, embracing the extremes of Left and Right, the party in power is expected to behave sensibly, as Mr Farley indicated.

When in 1986 the newly-elected Labour group announced the abolition of the office of Lord Mayor, public opinion rose against them and within a couple of weeks that decision was reversed.

Bradford Council had several conflicts with the Thatcher Government in the 1980s. These included the attempt to sue the Government for £12 million following a cut in the district’s rate support grant of £20 million.

“We made cuts of £8 million but the rest was too much,” said Mr Farley. “It was the Conservative group’s proposition that we sue the Government.

“We lost in the lower court, won in the High Court and lost in the House of Lords 2-1. From then on, whenever I met Mrs Thatcher she pronounced Bradford with a ‘t’ in the middle – I was the man from ‘Bratford’.

“I was invited to a cocktail party at 10 Downing Street. I got chatting to Denis Thatcher and at about 10.30pm he invited me into the Prime Minister’s private quarters to have a drink.

“All of a sudden Mrs Thatcher came in, as though from nowhere. She sat down, we had a drink and half-an-hour later I left. From then on we agreed to differ. She was charming but scary.”

What goes on in Bradford has always been of interest to Downing Street. Mr Pickles, for example, was one of the youngest chairmen of the national Young Conservatives. The late Sir Marcus Fox, MP for Shipley, was chairman of the Conservative Party’s influential backbench 1922 Committee.

In March 1997, beleaguered Conservative Prime Minister John Major made a point of bringing his General Election campaign to Bradford in the vain hope of winning friends and influencing voters.

And when Iain Duncan Smith, the 1987 prospective parliamentary candidate for Bradford West, was challenging for the leadership of the Conservative Party in 2001, his campaign manager Mr Pickles brought him back to Bradford to meet party members.

Baroness Thatcher’s last visit to Bradford was in February 1990, during the final months of Mr Pickles’s leadership of Bradford Council. It was he who advised the T&A to keep an eye on John Major in the event of Mrs Thatcher’s political demise. He was right.