Wets and dries

Wets and dries were labels introduced when Margaret Thatcher was Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

During the 1980s, members of the Conservative Party in Britain who opposed some of the more hard-line policies of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher were often referred to by their opponents as "wets". Thatcher coined the usage in 1979–80, with the meaning of feeble, lacking hardness, or willing to compromise with the unions.^[1] The label was especially applied to senior members of her government who were nevertheless outside Thatcher's inner circle and who expressed opposition to her strict monetarist policies designed to tackle inflation and her cuts to public spending.^[2]

Hugo Young identifies the most important "inner" wets as Jim Prior, Peter Walker, and Sir Ian Gilmour, as well as Lord Carrington and Norman St John-Stevas. The "outer" wets were more fragmented and less visible. They included Francis Pym, Michael Heseltine and Lord Hailsham.^[3]

Gilmour was the most outspoken, delivering a lecture at Cambridge in February 1980 where he argued: "In the Conservative view, economic liberalism à la Professor Hayek, because of its starkness and its failure to create a sense of community, is not a safeguard of political freedom but a threat to it."^[4]

In retaliation to being labelled as "wet", Thatcher's opponents within the party began referring to her supporters as the "dries".^[5]

Policies which came to be labelled as "dry" ones included foremostly reducing public spending, cutting taxes, raising interest rates, tightly controlling the money supply, and reducing the regulatory power of the state – all policies which were closely associated with Thatcher.

Outside of the Parliamentary Conservative Party, the youth sections of the Party saw increasingly bitter factional battles between "wets" and "dries". The Young Conservatives wing of the party remained in the hands of a strong "wet" and One Nation (Tory Reform Group) faction until 1989, whilst the Federation of Conservative Students fell to an alliance of libertarian and Monday Club supporters.

Origin of the term

Historically, English public-school slang described as "wet" someone judged to be weak, feeble or "soppy".^[6] Within the political context, the term was used by Thatcher's supporters as both as a noun and as an adjective to characterise people or policies which Thatcher would have considered weak or "wet".^[6]

Notable parliamentary wets

Notable parliamentary dries

See also

• Fundamentalists and gradualists
• One-nation conservatism
• Red Tory
• Young Conservatives
• List of ministers under Margaret Thatcher

References

Further reading

• Safire, William (2008). Safire's Political Dictionary. Oxford University Press. ISBN 9780195343342. 
• Young, Hugo (1989). One of Us: A Biography of Mrs. Thatcher. Pan. ISBN 9780330328418.