Thatcher’s fury at call to free Moors killers
MARGARET THATCHER was horrified at the prospect that Moors murderers Ian Brady and Myra Hindley could ever be released, newly released government papers reveal.
Files released today by the National Archives show that in 1985 Home Secretary Leon Brittan suggested Hindley could go free after 30 years while Brady could be released after 40.
The suggestion provoked a furious reaction from Mrs Thatcher who was adamant they should both die behind bars, describing their crime as “the most hideous and cruel of modern times”.
Over a period of 18 months in the 1960s, Brady and Hindley, his accomplice, kidnapped and murdered five children in the Manchester area.
The bodies of three of their victims were later found buried on Saddleworth Moor near Oldham.
In 1966 they were given life sentences with the trial judge recommending they should spend “a very long time” in prison.
In 1985, in line with policy at the time, their cases came up for review for the first time by the Parole Board.
In a memorandum to the prime minister, Mr Brittan said that while he did not expect the board to recommend their release on this occasion, there would come a time when they could be safely released into the public.
Mrs Thatcher, however, was having none of it.
Hindley made several appeals against her life sentence but was never released. She died in 2002, aged 60. Brady was declared criminally insane in 1985 and confined in the high-security Ashworth Hospital where he died earlier this year aged 79.
THE EXTENT to which the poll tax drove a wedge between Margaret Thatcher and her successor, John Major, is revealed in a previously unseen note he sent her after entering Downing Street.
The unpopular mechanism for funding local government had been blamed for the Tory rebellion which drove Mrs Thatcher from office – but she remained convinced that Mr Major would continue to drive through her “legacy” policy.
However, she disapproved of his “inclusive” style, and went on US television to complain: “I see a tendency to try to undermine what I achieved.”
Today’s newly-released files show Mr Major defending, in a handwritten postscript, his decision to replace her “community charge” with the present-day system of council tax,
“I am as fed up as you must be with the way the press seize on any issue to try and point up similarities/dis-similarities between us,” he wrote.
“I find it embarrassing and, more important, you must find it hurtful.”
His letter, beginning “Dear Margaret” and ending “Yours ever, John”, had warned that “responsible citizens, overwhelmingly our supporters” were being hit with rising bills as councils set the poll tax at levels far higher than anyone in government had expected.
“I do not think we could long defend a situation in which some people were paying more in community charge than in income tax,” he wrote.
He then sought to sweeten the pill by passing on an invitation from the Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev to attend a lunch or dinner in her Moscow, in her honour.
I am as fed up as you must be with the way the press seize on any issue Former Prime Minister John Major defends scrapping the so-called poll tax