A long article on Benjamin Disraeli in the New Yorker by Adam Gopnik, loosely linked to the two most recent biographies: Christopher Hibbert’s “Disraeli: The Victorian Dandy Who Became Prime Minister” and William Kuhn’s “The Politics of Pleasure: A Portrait of Benjamin Disraeli”.The article concentrates on Disraeli as adventurer who has lived his own dream and links him in various ways to modern politics. Specifically, there is a discussion...
Re-reading Harold Nicolson’s diaries for 1938 as part of separate research, I came across the entry for June 27: “Anthony Crossley [Conservative MP for Oldham] takes me to task for being so anti-Chamberlain. He says I am working for his fall. He says that the Conservatives realise this and simply hate me. I say, ‘But surely, Anthony, they are always so polite when I meet them?’ ‘Yes,’ he answers, ‘that is part of their technique.’”Nicolson...
The next speaker meeting of the Conservative History Group will be held on Tuesday 18 July at 6.30pm in the Boothroyd Room of the House of Commons. The subject will be "The Reputation of Neville Chamberlain". Speakers are Robert Self and Professor John Charmley. If you'd like to attend please email info@conservativehistory.org.uk to register. If you're not already a member you will be expected to join on the eveni...
This posting may be seen as perhaps being somewhat irrelevant to Conservative history but it covers a subject that is so important that Tory Historian took a unilateral decision on posting it.Today is the 65th anniversary of what turned out to be the crucial event of the Second World War – the German invasion of the Soviet Union, carried out despite the vows of eternal friendship of the 1939 Molotov – Ribbentrop Pact. It was the start of...
The next issue of the Conservative History Journal will be out in just a couple of weeks. Almost all the material has now come in and the editor is busy doing the final bits of editing as well as looking up illustrations. So, for all those folks who are starved of intellectual entertainment: help is on its w...
Yesterday, as all our readers know without doubt, was Waterloo Day and time for Tory Historian’s annual pilgrimage to Apsley House, where a great deal of jollification seemed to be going on.Firstly, there were guards in appropriate uniforms; the Battle of Waterloo had been laid out on a large table in the Waterloo Gallery and enthusiastic children were helping no less enthusiastic adult experts to put away the model soldiers; there were...
The fact that today is the birthday of one of the best-known detective story writers, Dorothy L. Sayers (1893 – 1957), gives me the chance to make a little detour in conservative history, not entirely unexpectedly, in the direction of that literary genre.I have already expressed the view that the classic detective story is a peculiarly conservative form of literature, whatever the political views of the author (Julian Symonds, for instance,...
It wasn’t all that long ago but seems to have been forgotten in the rush to declare the Conservative Party of the past the nasty party and its members, people who were barely seen to be human by the rest of the population. Really? How did that nasty, much-hated party of non-human aliens manage to win four elections, producing at least one landslide in 1983?On June 9, the party led by Margaret Thatcher, took 397 seats to Labour’s 209 with...
Thanks to the American correspondents of this blog we have another interesting opinion on what is the oldest political party in the world (not to be confused with the "oldest established permanent crap game in New York"). This is from Michael Barone of U.S. News & World Report, one of the best American journalists and commentators writing at present. "My money is on the Democrats being formed in 1832 (Martin Van Buren's first Democratic...
A sign of this blog's success is the fact that our readers are offering their own articles for posting, in the hopes that further discussion will be generated. This one is by Tim Roll-Pickering, who has his own blog on matters political.The Liberal Party was founded in 1859. Labour in 1900. The Liberal Democrats in 1988. Or looking further afield, the US Republicans in 1854, the Irish Fine Gael in 1933 and the Australian Liberal Party in...
John Barnes, who is a notable historian of the Conservative Party (and knows every detail of it, so far as I can make out) has sent this piece about Sally Ward, an undeservedly little known Conservative woman politician in the hopes that it will stimulate discussion on the subject, which will, in due course, influence the autumn edition of the Journal:Alderman Mrs Sally Ward was for one term Member of Parliament for Cannock. As a farmer’s wife, she spoke regularly in debated on agriculture and became known as “The Farmer’s Wife...
