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The 1990 Conservative Party leadership election in the United Kingdom took place on 20 November 1990 following the decision of former Defence and Environment Secretary Michael Heseltine to challenge Margaret Thatcher, the incumbent Prime Minister, for leadership of the Conservative Party. Thatcher failed to win outright under the terms of the election in the first ballot, and was persuaded to withdraw from the second round of voting. She announced her resignation on the morning of 22 November 1990, ending more than 15 years as Conservative leader and 11 years as prime minister. ==Background to the contest== Discontent with Thatcher's leadership of the party had been growing over the latter years of her tenure. In December 1989, she had been challenged for the leadership for the first time since her election in 1975, by the little known 69-year-old backbencher MP Sir Anthony Meyer. Thatcher faced no serious threat of losing to this stalking horse challenger, but her political credibility was undermined by the fact that 60 members of the parliamentary Conservative party had not supported her, 33 voting for Meyer, 24 spoiling their ballot papers, and three not voting at all. Throughout 1990, the popularity both of Thatcher and of the Conservative government waned considerably. Whereas in 1987 Thatcher had presided over an economic boom, in 1989 and 1990 interest rates had to be raised to 15% to cool inflation, which was now pushing 10%, and by late 1990 the economy was in the first stages of recession. The introduction of the deeply unpopular Community Charge (which opponents labelled the "Poll Tax") had been greeted with widespread non-payment and even a riot in Trafalgar Square in March 1990. Labour had held a lead in most of the opinion polls since mid-1989, and at the height of the Poll tax controversy, at least one opinion poll had shown Labour support above 50%, a lead of more than 20 points over the Tories, although the Conservative parliamentary majority still stood at nearly 100 seats. There were differences within the Cabinet over Thatcher's perceived intransigence in her approach to the European Economic Community. In particular, many leading Conservatives wanted Britain to join the Exchange Rate Mechanism, a move which Thatcher did not favour. In 1989, the then Foreign Secretary Geoffrey Howe and Chancellor Nigel Lawson forced Thatcher to agree to the "Madrid Conditions", namely that Britain would eventually join the ERM "when the time was right". In July 1989, she retaliated by removing Howe from the Foreign Office, while making him Deputy Prime Minister. Lawson—who had clashed with Thatcher over "shadowing the Deutschmark" early in 1988—then resigned as Chancellor in October 1989, unable to accept Thatcher taking independent advice from the economist Alan Walters. The beneficiary of these moves was the hitherto-unknown Chief Secretary to the Treasury, John Major, who briefly succeeded Howe as Foreign Secretary before succeeding Lawson as Chancellor, putting him in pole position to succeed Thatcher. In June 1990, Major suggested that the proposed Single European Currency should be a "hard ecu", competing for use against existing national currencies; this idea was not in the end adopted. In October, Major and the Foreign Secretary, Douglas Hurd, finally obtained agreement from a reluctant Thatcher that Britain should join the ERM. In her Party Conference Speech early in October, Thatcher mocked the Liberal Democrats' new "bird" logo in language lifted from the famous Monty Python "Dead Parrot sketch". Only days later, on 18 October, the Liberal Democrats took a seat from the Conservatives at the Eastbourne by-election, which had been caused by the assassination of Ian Gow by the IRA at the end of July.〔Harris 2014, p314〕 On 31 October, Thatcher spoke out firmly in the House of Commons against the vision of European integration, including a Single Currency, espoused by the European Commission under Jacques Delors, characterising it as the path to a federal Europe, and famously declared that her response to such a vision would be "No. No. No". This led to the resignation of Deputy Prime Minister, Sir Geoffrey Howe, on 1 November. However, Howe did not make his resignation speech immediately, because he had temporarily lost his voice. At the Lord Mayor's Banquet on 12 November, Thatcher dismissed the resignation by employing a cricketing metaphor: I am still at the crease, though the bowling has been pretty hostile of late. And in case anyone doubted it, can I assure you there will be no ducking the bouncers, no stonewalling, no playing for time. The bowling's going to get hit all round the ground. That is my style. The next day, Howe made his resignation speech from the backbenches, addressing his dismay at Thatcher's approach and famously responding to her recent cricketing metaphor by employing one of his own. Explaining how, in his opinion, her approach made it hard for British ministers to negotiate for Britain's interests in Europe, he declared: It is rather like sending your opening batsmen to the crease only for them to find, the moment the first balls are bowled, that their bats have been broken before the game by the team captain. Howe's dramatic speech reinforced the change in general perception of Thatcher from the "Iron Lady" to a divisive and confrontational figure. Within a week, another critic, the pro-European former Cabinet minister Michael Heseltine, had announced that he would challenge her for the leadership of the party. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Conservative Party (UK) leadership election, 1990」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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