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Thatcher’s champion

Sir: The Spectator may have been Margaret Thatcher’s first press champion as Fraser Nelson notes (‘Labour’s best hope’, 17 May), but its support was not unwavering. At the end of 1974 it was unduly impressed by the efforts of Heath’s allies to brand her a food-hoarder when she sensibly encouraged pensioners to stock up with tinned food at a time of rising inflation. On 7 December 1974 it opined: ‘for the milk-snatcher to become the food-hoarder shows precisely the same political ineptitude as Sir Keith Joseph and it is likely to have the same political consequence’. Her defiance of the Tory critics swiftly silenced the editor’s doubts. ‘I saw how they broke Keith,’ she told him, ‘but they won’t break me.’

Alistair Cooke

London SW1

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