Twenty-five years ago tomorrow, the management of the British coalmining industry shut Cortonwood in Yorkshire. I was a young Conservative MP at the time, for a constituency in the adjoining county.

Cortonwood was the trigger. The miners' strike that followed - a national convulsion that at times felt not far from civil war - became shorthand for an elemental conflict between what Margaret Thatcher called “our people” and the rest.

The Tory grass roots and vote stayed strong, and these battles, though some raged hardly half an hour's drive away from the West Derbyshire Conservative Association's headquarters in Matlock, gave me no constituency trouble at all.

They troubled me personally though. I felt at the time that this clash was brutalising my party's character unnecessarily. We all despised Arthur Scargill, of course, but behind him and his officials stood the miners themselves and their families: human stories, human beings, infantry in a war that they were powerless to influence. Mrs Thatcher's division of the world seemed crude and cruel to me. “Their” people?

BACKGROUND

• We don't look back in anger

• The miners' strike: facing up to people who wish to play God

• This slump is stirring a political storm

• Election victory may not be worth it

Times Archive, 1984: Miners' strike spreads to 100 pits

Militant picketing brought out on strike more than half of the coal industry's labour force

• Leading article: Cutting the cost of coal

• Scargill's arrest and pit riot shatter peace hope

• Scargill in hospital after bloody battle of Orgreave

Couldn't we show ourselves ready to go the extra mile with mining communities and look for ways to connect - making it clearer that we did not regard mineworkers as the enemy? I continued to believe this after leaving politics. Many still do. The columnist Quentin Letts, in his recent book 50 People Who Buggered Up Britain, fingers Mrs Thatcher herself on his list. And, yes, she did do what Quentin says: sharpening social divisions and uglifying the Conservative Party's image, especially in the North.

But is there any other way? I'm no longer sure that there always is. Two decades after leaving the Tory trenches I've come finally to believe that those surprising bedfellows, Karl Marx and Mrs Thatcher, were right: to an important degree, politics is always and necessarily about the clash of interests. The boss can't be on everyone's side. As Lenin put it: “Who whom?” Who gains and at whose expense? Somebody's got to win.

Somebody had to win the miners' strike. With all its brutalities, that harsh and sensational episode achieved three things. First, its immediate aim: to wind down a fantastically expensive, loss-making industry and remove from around the nation's windpipe the fingers of a bullying union.

Second, it broke the will of the trade union movement and the Left generally, and established what today we call a “narrative”. The inevitablism of collective bargaining and the mixed economy was reversed; the new story was of the next inevitablism: further privatisation, continuing reforms of employment law, the doom of traditional, single-industry communities, and the surrender finally to global economics.

Third, it established a leader - Mrs Thatcher - as a winner whom you crossed at your peril, completing the work of the Falklands war, another primal clash that somebody had to lose. These two conflicts established Mrs Thatcher, and Thatcherism, so formidably that even the Labour Party had to bend to the new orthodoxy.

Speaking some years later to her devoted and early ally the late Ian Gow, I voiced my unease about the brutalising side to her approach. “In the lady's view,” he replied, “when fighting with an alligator in a swamp, if you manage to drive it up on to a mudbank, then stick in the knife - don't help it back into the deep.” I'm afraid that I now think Ian was right, and that there is a lesson here for an incoming Conservative government.

Which may be incoming faster than we know. Could Gordon Brown's administration be falling apart? Having repeated often enough that (now) 15 months is only a short time before a general election, I'm starting to wonder whether it's too long. When strategy disappears altogether and nobody knows what's going on, the end is sometimes near.

Can this Cabinet last another 15 months? Survival must remain the likelihood, but I begin to wonder how. Ministers such as the Chancellor and Lord Myners seem ignorant of each other's doings. The Business Secretary storms off on a pet project (to part privatise the Royal Mail) certain to humiliate the Chief Whip. Government MPs considered part of the “payroll” vote sign hostile early day motions - yet nobody dares to sack them. A comprehensive record of a Cabinet meeting appears in a Sunday newspaper. The head of the Office for National Statistics declares apparent war on the almost certain culprit in the recent flagrant misuse of knife-crime statistics: the Prime Minister. And senior figures set above us queue up to denounce the Government the moment they step down.

Alarm bells are ringing, something quite close to sauve qui peut is setting in, and I'm not the first to observe that at this stage John Major's Government was holding together better, and doing more, than Mr Brown's.

All of which is moving Tory minds on from whether and how they can win, to what they will do when they've won. David Cameron describes himself (I think sincerely) as an admirer of Lady Thatcher. If so, this is not a bad moment to think about the lessons of the miners' strike.

I don't mean that he will face a bankers' strike; or a teachers' or prison officers' strike; or even a civil servants' strike; or any strike at all. I mean that shockingly early in the life of the next administration it will become clear that if prime minister Cameron is to do anything but affably tread water, there will emerge substantial, sometimes powerful and sometimes pitiable groups who can never be reconciled to his plans. Often they will be producer interests - such as public servants who benefit from the security of the state monolith, and don't want to see health, education and social care “balkanised” (as they will put it). But they may also be single parents who will be the relative losers from rules rejigged to “favour” marriage. And if we really do (as Kenneth Clarke declares) need to rebalance the economy towards manufacturing, then whom or what are we rebalancing away from? Financial services? Self-rewarding brotherhoods on the boards of banks? Real clashes of interest lie ahead. There will be potent enemies to make.

My hunch is that many voters would like to know now that Mr Cameron is not afraid to make these enemies. So far, he and his communications team have bent every effort to telling and showing us just how many friends the Tories want to make and keep. But sooner than we think, the party must be honest with us and with itself about the enemies too. Who? Whom?

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