[2] The label was especially applied to senior members of Thatcher's government who were nevertheless outside her inner circle and who expressed opposition to her strict monetarist policies, and her cuts to public spending.
[3] 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.
[4] 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.
[6] Named in honour of Nicholas Scott, at the time a rising star of the anti-Thatcher wing of the Party, it served as a convivial meeting ground for wet MPs.
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 remained in the hands of an alliance of libertarian and Monday Club supporters.