Margaret Thatcher did not share his sentiments. When she assumed power in 1979, YC membership was only 27,500 and during her years in office it fell by a third. This steady decline was not helped by her move in 1981 to cut the YC budget by 70 per cent. In all the tributes and analysis that the death of Lady Thatcher has provoked, her attitude to the party's youth movement has barely been mentioned. But Mrs Thatcher's antipathy to the Young Conservatives was in no small part due to their continuing loyalty to her predecessor. At the YC conferences of the early '80s, there was a mutinous mood among members who felt that they had enjoyed greater status under Heath.

There may also have been a more personal reason for her impatience with the party's youth branch. As a prospective parliamentary candidate for the safe Labour seat of Dartford in 1949, the then Miss Margaret Roberts had dutifully done the rounds of Kent's YCs.At Orpington she had warned against the socialist power grab before being treated to tea, games and amusements in the garden. While at the YC fête at Ashdown House in Dartford, she had told the rapt crowd that once a Conservative government was in power, "they would be able to say with Keats: ‘Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, but to be young was very heaven.'" This line is actually Wordsworth's, an uncharacteristic error from the detail-obsessed future prime minister. After the speeches there were games of rolling the penny, roulette and bagatelle and Miss Roberts was presented with a bouquet.

But these afternoons courting the local YC branches bore little fruit. Miss Roberts failed to oust the Labour incumbent Norman Dodds and when it came to Finchley in 1959, she didn't waste quite so much time quoting poetry to the teenagers of north London.

The minutes of a meeting between Mrs Thatcher and YC representatives in 1982 reveal the party hierarchy's feelings. On a blank page, her Private Parliamentary Secretary Ian Gow has scrawled: "Each is more ghastly than the other."