Ian Gilmour was Lord Privy Seal in Margaret Thatcher’s government. He disagreed with her economic policies and became the most outspoken of the ministers her supporters called “wets.”
In February 1980, in a lecture at Cambridge, 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.”
Thatcher believed he was privately briefing journalists against her. He was sacked in September 1981.