In March 1985 Trevor-Roper attended a dinner party at 10 Downing Street, organised by the historian Hugh Thomas and his wife Vanessa, for the Prime Minister, Margaret Thatcher, to meet writers and scholars. In January Oxford academics had voted against her receiving an honorary degree. Afterwards Trevor-Roper wrote to tell Blake that he had been "shaken" by some of the things Mrs Thatcher had said. "She has no friends, listens to no one, and never relaxes." The following letter was written afterwards to another of the guests, Noël Annan. 

To Noël Annan, April 10, 1985 

The Master's Lodge, Peterhouse

My dear Noël,

How delightful to wake up every morning and feel glad to be alive! And to regard your period as head of a Cambridge college as the happiest time of your life! How I envy you your happy temperament! I suppose it comes from being a man of the Left: a dangerous Marxist radical in the eyes of our colleague Lord Beloff; at least heir to the Enlightenment, optimist, forward-looking, a believer in the doctrine of Progress and the National Goodness and Perfectibility of Man, attainable by Nationalisation, Trades Union power, and abolition of the House of Lords. Perhaps I should change my party and come and sit on your Benches, if not for the greater good of the country, at least for my own mental comfort. As your fellow radical Stuart Hampshire once said, "to be a socialist is a small price to pay for a good conscience".

But seriously, do you think that our dear PM has gone bananas? I was rather shaken by some of the things she said at that curious dinner party — her impatience of obstruction by the organs of society: committees of enquiry, parliamentary procedure, courts of law, and, no doubt now, the House of Lords. Her Toryism seems to be rather that of Charles I than of Edmund Burke. And I was horrified to hear and see her on television, telling her hosts in Malaysia that she had "seen off" the miners, and that Trades Unions were children which needed to be spanked by Nanny for their own good. I should have thought that the nursery-governess image was one which she ought particularly to avoid! But I suppose it comes naturally, irresistibly, to her. What do you think lay behind that party? Did someone say, we must improve your public image, especially in universities and places where they brain-wash the young! Get some dons and writers to dinner? But what an odd collection! Who, for instance, can have recommended Theodore Zeldin? And the idea that Tony Powell and V. S. Naipaul and Iris Murdoch would be her literary paladins is very comic. As for the Lord Quinton [philosopher, President of Trinity College, Oxford], no one could have done more harm to her cause than he did by his ridiculous flippant speech in Congregation at Oxford on the day of the vote...

My dear Noel, you Stoics (I am sure) hang together. Could you not persuade that noble lord to go into a retreat in Buckinghamshire for a time: to hide his light (and his voice, and his face) under a bushel (whatever that is in this context)? No doubt it is a very comforting thing to be a peer and a head of a house, etc., but I confess that, when I look at Mrs T's other academic peers (Quinton, Beloff and now the Lord Butterworth), I do not feel the same complacency. 

I hope you are enjoying the knockabout turn of the Right Reverend Prelates on the matter of the Resurrection. Why can't they behave like the sensible 18th century bishops "whose sound understanding", as Gibbon wrote, "is perhaps seldom engaged with that abstruse mystery"? 

On which orthodox note I end and sign myself,

Yours ever

Hugh