Oxford to become Master of Peterhouse from 1980 to 1987, though in later years he came to regret supporting Trevor-Roper's arrival there. Cowling's reactionary clique thought he would be an arch-conservative who would oppose the admission of women. In the event, Trevor-Roper feuded constantly with Cowling and his allies, while launching a series of administrative reforms. Women were admitted in 1983 at Trevor-Roper's urging. The British journalist Neal Ascherson summarised the quarrel between Cowling and Trevor-Roper as:Lord Dacre, far from being a romantic Tory ultra, turned out to be an anti-clerical Whig with a preference for free speech over superstition. He did not find it normal that fellows should wear mourning on the anniversary of General Franco’s death, attend parties in SS uniform or insult black and Jewish guests at high table. For the next seven years, Trevor-Roper battled to suppress the insurgency of the Cowling clique ("a strong mind trapped in its own glutinous frustrations"), and to bring the college back to a condition in which students might actually want to go there. Neither side won this struggle, which soon became a campaign to drive Trevor-Roper out of the college by grotesque rudeness and insubordination. In a review of Adam Sisman's 2010 biography of Trevor-Roper, the Economist wrote that picture of Peterhouse in the 1980s was "startling", stating the college had become under Cowling's influence a sort of right-wing "lunatic asylum", who were determined to sabotage Trevor-Roper's reforms. In November 1989 Cowling published his essay on "The Sources of the New Right" in Encounter which detailed the ideological roots of Thatcherism in Britain and became the Preface to the second edition of Mill and Liberalism in 1990. In 1990 Cowling described himself as "an intellectual Thatcherite, just as I was an intellectual Powellite, and I think it is important that the Conservative party should be in good hands and that it should win elections...I am a warm supporter [of the Thatcher government]". In Cowling's view "Liberalism is essentially the belief that there can be a reconciliation of all difficulties and differences, and since there can't, it is a misleading way to approach politics". He regarded Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses as "a nasty, sneering, free-thinking book ... I can understand why the book is offensive and it didn't seem to me to be anything but offensive when I read it. Some thinking Moslems take a view of the nature