Lord Pym

A stalwart of the Heath and first Thatcher governments, he eventually turned on his leader, angrily lambasting her policies and demanding that the flag of "traditional Conservatism" be kept flying.

His 1984 book, The Politics of Consent, contained a devastating indictment from the inside of Margaret Thatcher's style of government, and he bluntly warned her to "serve all the people of the country, not only those who stand on their own two feet but also those who cannot". Not everyone, he argued, wanted Britain to be the richest and most efficient country in the world if the penalty was widespread hopelessness and a divided nation.

Pym went to Eton and Cambridge, farmed an estate in Bedfordshire and had a business making agricultural tents. He served in the 9th Lancers during the war, being twice mentioned in dispatches and earning the Military Cross for action in Italy.

He was the fifth Pym to serve in the Commons; one ancestor, John Pym, was one of the MPs whose attempted impeachment by Charles I helped start the English Civil War. He won his Cambridgeshire seat in a by-election in 1961, and the following year became a whip. He was steadily promoted and, in 1970, became Ted Heath's chief whip. It was Pym who whipped Heath's flagship Common Market Bill through the Commons.

Towards the end of 1973, Heath removed him from the whips' office and sent him to Northern Ireland. He was only there for a few months because by March 1974 the Tories were in opposition. Pym was asked to shadow two departments, Northern Ireland and agriculture, but the strain proved too much and he left front-line politics and concentrated for a while on his farm.

He bounced back into the Thatcher team in 1976 as Shadow Leader of the House with responsibility for devolution, and he seems to have made a reasonable fist of it. In November 1978, he became Shadow Foreign Secretary and in July 1979, he became Mrs Thatcher's first Defence Secretary.

It was not long after that that the trouble started. In December 1980, he complained publicly about spending cuts that were threatening his department, but others thought the criticism was more general of Mrs Thatcher's economic strategy. Nevertheless he became Paymaster-General and then Leader of the Commons in 1981.

In February 1982, there were further signs of tensions between Pym and Thatcher, when she was forced on to the defensive in the Commons following a Pym speech in which he warned there was unlikely to be a return to full employment or an early improvement in living standards.

Again matters were smoothed over, and when Lord Carrington resigned over the Falklands crisis, Pym stepped in as Foreign Secretary. By inviting Pym into the Foreign Office, Thatcher thought she would keep him loyal and that she could unite the party, but problems persisted and he found himself being rubbished by her inner circle.

There were even differences over Falklands war policy. Pym was going all-out for settlement and, at one time, shortly before the sinking of the General Belgrano, seemed to have come quite close, but the message from the government back benches was that a settlement was out of the question.

At the end of the war, the attrition continued. Thatcher employed her own foreign policy adviser, Sir Anthony Parsons, and rumours of Pym's imminent demise began sweeping Westminster. He was touted at one point as a future Speaker but this was regarded by Pym as an insulting suggestion, implying the end of his active party political career.

In May 1983, there were reports that Pym had threatened to resign from the government if Thatcher moved him from the Foreign Office after the election, but that is exactly what she did. Shortly before polling day, he had the temerity to state in an interview that he did not think a landslide victory for Thatcher was desirable. Thatcher, having achieved just that, sacked him not only from the Foreign Office but from the cabinet altogether.

Pym, in short, was hopping mad, and spent the next few years making his feelings clear. He believed the centre ground of British politics was still alive and kicking, but had been occupied by the Owen-Jenkins SDP, which he said was "standing on Conservative ground, usurped because the Conservatives have abandoned it".

He emerged as the leader of the "wets", fronting a shambolic group of about two dozen MPs that called itself Conservative Centre Forward. In March 1985, he launched a stinging attack on Nigel Lawson's so-called jobs and enterprise Budget, and he continued sniping from the sidelines for a further year before announcing, in May 1986, that he would not be standing at the next election. He was raised to the peerage as Baron Pym of Sandy in the 1987 dissolution honours list.

Francis Pym was one of the old-style Heathite Tories - Jim Prior was another - who were made to feel increasingly uncomfortable by the hard edge of right-wing Thatcherism, and eventually found themselves being treated by the Tory hierarchy as little more than an irritation.

While supporting much of what Thatcher was seeking to achieve, he did not support the way in which she went about it, stating openly that he felt the government's tone often sounded unattractive and unsympathetic, and that conviction, determination and forceful logic could easily turn into dogmatism, inflexibility and insensitivity. As a result, people felt that the government neither understood nor cared about them.

He said Thatcher increased the centralisation of government, tried to run the major departments herself, and created a machinery within 10 Downing Street that constituted a government within a government. With that analysis of the Thatcher years, few now would argue.

He married Valerie Fortune Daglish in 1949. They had two sons and two daughters.