Cabinet Minister and "wet"

Born: October 11, 1927;

Died: December 12, 2016

JIM Prior, who has died aged 89, was a Tory politician and cabinet minister famous for failing to see eye to eye with Margaret Thatcher. Despite being appointed to her first Cabinet, he was a committed "wet" and, after he resigned as Northern Ireland Secretary in 1984, he wasted little time in attacking a great deal that had gone on in the early Thatcher years.

In his memoirs, published in 1986, he said that Thatcher's Treasury team were all theorists with no experience of running a whelk stall, let alone a decent-sized business. In a scathing critique, he wrote: "It was a very simplistic approach, a combination of her own instincts founded in the corner shop in Grantham, laid over by a veneer from Hayek and Friedman. In a world increasingly independent and with a people used to a welfare state, it looked an unpromising scenario."

He argued that it was on the basis of this "simple-minded analysis" that Thatcher and Geoffrey Howe concocted their first Budget, which was to do, he thought, so much harm. He felt the Treasury team were out of their depth, and said as much. "Their attitude to manufacturing industry bordered on the contemptuous," he said. "They shared the view of other monetarists in the Cabinet that we were better suited as a nation to being a service economy." Small wonder, then, that Prior fairly quickly found his star on the wane.

He was educated at Charterhouse and Pembroke College, Cambridge, graduating with a first class degree in estate management in 1950. He was commissioned in the Royal Norfolk Regiment in 1946, and served in India and Germany. He had a career as a farmer and land agent before entering politics as the MP for Lowestoft (later Waveney) in 1959, a seat which he held throughout his time in the Commons.

Some say he could have been a Conservative Prime Minister if the party had not swung sharply to the right in the mid-1970s. He rose to a position of prominence in the party through association with Edward Heath, who made him the youngest ever Conservative vice-chairman in 1965. He was Heath's Parliamentary Private Secretary for five years until 1970, and moved straight into the Cabinet as Minister of Agriculture when Heath became Prime Minister that year.

From 1972-74 he was Leader of the House and, in 1974, Prior urged Heath to go for an early election. Heath refused to accept the advice, and this probably cost him the premiership.

Following Mrs Thatcher's leadership victory, when Prior tied with Sir Geoffrey Howe on 19 votes, Prior began to distance himself from Heath, though he remained on the Heathite wing of the party.

He was made employment spokesman and began the process of rapprochement with the unions which the Tories needed to persuade voters that a Conservative government would not produce a return to industrial relations mayhem, but in the first two years of the Thatcher government there was a constant running battle on economic policy between five or six wets in the Cabinet and about a dozen Thatcher radicals.

In the summer of 1981 the Treasury came forward with a package of public spending cuts which the Cabinet as a whole could not tolerate. It was shelved until the autumn, by which time Thatcher had completed a reshuffle which removed or marginalised her opponents.

Prior, fuming, was sent to Northern Ireland. Before the announcement he let it be known that he would resign rather than be moved from the centre of economic policy decision-making, but Thatcher held her nerve and Prior duly went across the water. It was a thoroughly miserable experience for him, marked by constant speculation that he would resign from the post, which he eventually did in 1984.

He stayed in the Commons, but announced in January, 1986, that he would be standing down at the next general election, which took place the following year.

He said he no longer had the willingness to play an active part in politics and, in any case, another string had been added to his bow in 1984 when he became chairman of GEC. Business became an increasing interest with, as well as the chairmanship of the massive electronics company, chairmanship of Allders Ltd. from 1984-94, and a directorship with United Biscuits from 1990-94. He was raised to the peerage as Baron Prior of Brampton in the County of Suffolk in 1987.

Apart from Willie Whitelaw, there was no place in the Thatcher administration for the sort of bluff, old-style Conservative that was Jim Prior. He might have made a decent, avuncular Leader of the House of Lords, but by the time he went there he was totally disillusioned with politics and had decided to devote himself to business for the rest of his career.

He was a casualty of the hard edge of Thatcherism, and he made pretty clear what he thought of her. He called her decision to quote St Francis of Assisi on the steps of No. 10 when she became Prime Minister ("Where there is discord, may we bring harmony") "humbug," neatly setting the tone for the divisions which we now know, thanks to Prior and others like him, plagued the Iron Lady's first term of office.

Prior married in 1954 to Jane Primrose Gifford. She survives him together with their three sons and one daughter.