A Tory MP has described the row over how Margaret Thatcher would vote in the EU referendum as "unadulterated nonsense" before quoting and backing a Eurosceptic quote from the former prime minister.
Anne Main said she was "amazed" that people close to Thatcher had "invoked the dead" by stating how she would vote in the upcoming referendum on Britain's EU membership.
But the St Albans MP then quoted a 1988 speech from the former Tory leader in which she criticised the "dominance" of Brussels. Ms Main then added: "Hear hear to that."
Ms Main, who backs leaving the EU, told an Opposition Day debate on the timing of the referendum: "We have heard a lot of unadulterated nonsense already.
"I'm amazed that we're invoking the dead, Baroness Thatcher.
"She apparently was speaking from the grave and I'm amazed that anybody is invoking those sort of comments now.
"I would say that her speech in Bruges in 1988 where she said 'we have not successfully rolled back the frontiers of the state in Britain only to see them reimposed at a European level with a European superstate exercising a new dominance from Brussels'.
"I'd say 'hear hear to that'.
"So I'm sure we're going to have a lot of ridiculous comments, a lot of nonsense will be proposed that we cannot possibly exist outside."
The row over whether Thatcher would have voted to Leave or Remain has continued for days.
Her authorised biographer, Charles Moore, said that after she left office, the former prime minister had argued that Britain should leave the EU.
But over the weekend one of her closest aides - her foreign policy adviser Lord Powell of Bayswater - said he believed that she would have backed David Cameron's renegotiation plan.
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