Britain: Vitriol in the Commons

“I was on holiday at the time,” Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher told the House of Commons last week as opposition M.P.s jeered. It was a rare attempt by the Iron Lady to skirt responsibility, and Labor Party Leader Neil Kinnock challenged her explanation. Four times the Prime Minister, shouting, demanded that he withdraw his remarks; four times Kinnock refused. “Frankly,” he told the House, “I do not believe her. The domineering style of her government forbids the belief that she was not involved in an issue as important as this.”

The issue was the government’s decision last August to prosecute Clive Ponting, a senior civil servant in the Ministry of Defense, for violating Britain’s Official Secrets Act. Ponting had leaked to a Labor M.P. documents that detailed the government’s decision to attack the Argentine cruiser General Belgrano during the Falklands war in 1982. Although Ponting’s lawyer subsequently put the odds against acquittal at 300 to 1, the jury found the defendant not guilty.

Even though Kinnock later accepted her explanation, the vitriolic Commons exchange was a bitter pill for Thatcher at a time when she should have been happily celebrating her tenth anniversary as Conservative Party leader. To add to her troubles, Britain’s eleven-month-old coal miners’ strike dragged on, even as a major poll put the Labor Party neck and neck with the Conservatives at 37%, an 8-point drop for the Tories in the 20 months since the last general election.