Word: backbenches
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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King Arthur, as London's Monty Python troupe imagines him, is really an awfully sensible, decent chap. Played by Graham Chapman, he is the kind of tweedy fellow who should be sitting on the Tory party backbench in modern Britain rather than running around 6th century England forming Round Tables and looking for holy grails...
...mute party conflicts. Calling at his Wilton Street house-still under repair after a pre-Christmas I.R.A. bomb blast-she renewed her invitation to have him join her as shadow Foreign Secretary. As she knew in advance that he would, he declined, stating a preference for a less conspicuous backbench perch-perhaps in the hope that if things go badly for Mrs. Thatcher he will be recalled to party leadership...
...Nation. Some of Mrs. Thatcher's support undoubtedly came from disgruntled backbench M.P.s who felt that their talent had gone unrecognized and untapped by Heath. Most of her votes, however, came from the party's right wing, which believed that Heath's Disraeli-inspired "one nation" policy -particularly his publicly expressed willingness to join Labor in a coalition government-constituted a betrayal of traditional Tory principles. Although Heath's gruff confrontation tactics with Britain's powerful miners' union cost the Tories the general elections last February, his more mellow conciliatory tone in the unsuccessful...
...chief pro-Common Market spokesman in the national referendum that Wilson plans to hold before the end of June. Behind the scenes, Heath will be working hard to see that the Tories do not drift too far to the right. In this endeavor, he will have plenty of backbench support; even M.P.s who voted against Heath were touched by the personal sadness of this formidable, lonely man going down to unexpected defeat. But with the focus turning immediately to the next phase of elections, there was little time for sentimental postmortems. As the notoriously hardheaded Mrs. Thatcher...
Last week British Prime Minister Edward Heath also won a small but helpful vote of confidence on the EEC. Pro-Market Labor Party M.P.s, led by the rebellious Roy Jenkins (TIME, April 24), abstained on an antiMarket resolution, proposed by a group of backbench Tories who are fighting Heath on British membership, that would have submitted Britain's entry into EEC to a national referendum. The handy margin of Heath's victory on the vote-284 to 235-suggests that Britain's formal entry into the Ten will proceed unimpeded...