Margaret and Denis’s 1977 toilet ordeal, and other stories

Oh, dear, what can the matter be? Cabinet papers from 1977, just released under the thirty-year-rule, reveal that Margaret Thatcher got stuck in a lavatory. The Iron Lady was imprisoned when the inside handle of her hotel room door in Houston refused to budge - a fate that also befell husband Denis, separately. Thatcher was in Houston to address the English Speaking Union as UK opposition leader. She revealed some of her famous resolve when, according to the British consul general of the time, Roy Fox, she "had a short wrestling match... for the microphone to enable the questioning to go on when [the chairman of the event] thought she had had enough".

The newly released records also show that miners' union leader Arthur Scargill was spied on by MI5, at the behest of Labour prime minister James Callaghan. On July 5 1977, Callaghan told officials: "Keep me informed about Scargill's movements. He may have to be warned off."

Another set of papers reveal that Tony Benn's department raised objections to celebratory floodlighting of buildings along the Thames during the Queen's silver jubilee, leading to angry skirmishes between Downing Street and "the anti-monarchist" at the energy department. In the margin of one set of papers, Callaghan scrawled "bloody nonsense" and complained about "pernickety bureaucracy", after the energy department raised concerns that floodlighting would set a bad example to a British public being asked to save energy during a deep recession. An allusion in a Home Office memo to "the anti-monarchist" at the energy department is almost certainly a reference to veteran politician Tony Benn.

Another series of papers show that the Labour party recognised the threat to them posed by Margaret Thatcher's "highly populist appeal to individual materialism" as early as 1977. The comments were made by policy wonk Bernard Donoghue during a meeting in Chequers called by Callaghan. ·