While the British conservative base seems to have been generally pleased that Prime Minister Stephen Harper made a stop in London to speak to members of both Houses of Parliament Thursday, one shadow cabinet minister was annoyed by Harper’s partisan tone.

John Spellar, the Labour party’s shadow minister for foreign and commonwealth affairs, told iPolitics Friday he found Harper’s address to the members “distinctly partisan,” saying parts of the speech would have been more appropriate for “a meeting of the parliamentary Conservative party.”

… this wasn’t a speech from a big figure from a big country.

In particular, Spellar (along with at least one columnist) noted Harper’s references to Margaret Thatcher and his lauding of Cameron’s leadership.

In his speech, Harper told Cameron how much he has admired the prime minister’s “determined efforts and your wise and principled leadership during these last few years as we have dealt with the difficult and critical issues facing our countries and the world issues which require the best of what has always made Britain unique and strong, and which you have plainly demonstrated.”

Of Thatcher, Harper noted what he called the late prime minister’s refusal to accept any thought of inevitable decline and did so “not as an expression of good cheer, but as a matter of resolve and action and so Britain rose once more.”

“Saying how wonderful Margaret Thatcher is – he might have noticed that this was a controversial issue,” Spellar said Friday. “Now, of course he’s a conservative, but throughout the speech to be obsessing about how only Conservatives had the answer and therefore he and David Cameron were the right people, is not the way to do it.”

Spellar said it was “not prime ministerial,” and that a number of his Labour party colleagues expressed how “disappointed they were” with the address.

There were elements of Harper’s speech that Spellar said he found appropriate, but that it was the context within which those were addressed that mattered.

Harper did address the pending EU–Canada free trade deal as well as Canada and Britain’s shared history and values. All of which was “fine,” Spellar said, were it not for the partisan spin. Harper would have found that many of the things that Canada and the U.K. do together, including pushing for open societies and increasing free trade are actually shared concerns among the parties in Westminster, Spellar said.

dare to be dull – or at least consistent” like Harper. ConservativeHome , a grassroots website for the conservative movement in Britain, saw Harper’s visit as an opportunity for U.K. Prime Minster David Cameron to learn some lessons, including “– or at least consistent” like Harper.

“All of these are common issues, certainly here between parties. They would be agreed issues,” he said. “That’s what makes it sort of slightly concerning when someone just seeks to make that a narrow, short-sighted partisan issue.”

Spellar, who has held his seat since 1992 and served as minister of state for both defence and transport, also said the tone was a departure from previous Canadian prime ministers.

“Canadian prime ministers in the past have had that broader perspective, so it’s not a case of saying ‘Here’s someone from Canada, they’re bound to be parochial’. That’s not the case at all,” he said. “It is that someone’s really not speaking for Canada, which is a G8 member, a G20 member, a major player in international affairs. And this wasn’t a speech from a big figure from a big country.”

Prime Minister Harper is on a tour of the U.K., France and Ireland in advance of the G8 meeting at Lough Erne in Northern Ireland.