A selection of Lord Lexden's letters this year to The Daily Telegraph, The Times, The New Statesman, The Spectator and others. You can read letters from previous years in the menu to the left.
17/12/24 - The 1922 Committee's model chairman
The Spectator
Sir, Alex Burghart is evidently a tiresome moderniser (Books, 7 December). He seeks to turn Graham Brady, the longest-serving chairman the famous 1922 Committee has had, into a mere chair, following the wretched fashion of the day. Brady should always be accorded the dignity of his full title. He scarcely put a foot wrong during one of the bleakest periods in Conservative history, constantly showing up the deficencies of hurried fleeting ministers through his imperturbability and tactical skill. During the 14 years he presided over his influential backbench committee, the Conservative party at large got through 15 chairmen, ‘transient and embarrassed phantoms’ (in Disraeli’s famous phrase) every one of them. Brady might perhaps have done a little more to help quash the myth that the 1922 Committee was the creation of heroic Tory backbench MPs who kicked Lloyd George out of power in October 1922, and to substitute the modest truth: that it was brought into existence in April 1923 by a handful of new boys elected in November the previous year.
The one serious criticism that might be made of the otherwise model chairman is that he did not end the current embarrassing system for electing the party leader. What could be more obvious than that party members should select four or so candidates, from which MPs would then elect the leader with whom they felt best able to work?
Alistair Lexden
House of Lords
22/11/24 - The fascists' press baron
The New Statesman
Alison Phillips (The Critics, 8 November) states that “Northcliffe supported Oswald Mosley’s Blackshirts and the Nazis”. That would have been difficult since Northcliffe died in 1922 when Mosley was a mildly left-wing MP.
The guilty man was Lord Rothermere, owner of the rabid Daily Mail. He became briefly enamoured of the Blackshirts in 1934, praising their “sound, commonsense, Conservative doctrine” (he was a rather dim man). Within seven months he fell out with Mosley, tearing up their joint plans to set up a cigaratte-manufacturing company.
He worshipped Hitler for years. One historian of the period has described him as “perhaps the most influential single protagonist for fascism between the wars.”
Alistair Lexden
House of Lords
13/11/24 - Archbishop Welby's unprecedented resignation
The Daily Telegraph
SIR – As Archbishop of Canterbury, Justin Welby was guilty of sins of omission and commission. He diid nothing when the London diocese hounded a priest, a close friend of mine at Cambridge, over untrue allegations of sex abuse, driving him to take his own life in 2020.
On the other hand, he was happy to sacrifice the reputation of the great Bishop George Bell in 2015, many years after his death. on the basis of a single uncorroborated complaint of sex abuse, alleged to have occurred in the 1940s. He failed to get the complaint properly investigated, and, despite two independent inquiries, stubbornly insisted for several years that Bell remained under a “significant cloud” until finally withdrawing the hideous slur in 2021 after a long hard-fought campaign in Bell’s defence.
Welby’s departure ends an unhappy chapter in the history of the once glorious Church of England.
Lord Lexden
London SW1
04/11/24 - Conservatives and Tories
The Times
Sir, It is very silly of Sir Lynton Crosby to suggest that Conservatives should stop calling themselves Tories (“Tories should drop pejorative name, says election guru”, Nov 2). The Tories, who first came on the political scene in 1680, greeted the start of a new political era after the 1832 Reform Act, by relaunching themselves as the Conservative Party. They continued to use their old name alongside their new one as a constant reminder of their historic traditions of moderation and adaptabilty, on which they will need to draw now if the Party is to be rebuilt as a serious and constructive political force.
Lord Lexden
Conservative Party historian
14/10/24 - No escape from 10 Downing Street
The Times
Sir, William Gladstone is to blame for the privations suffered by his successors at No 10 (“Life inside the Downing Street ‘crack den’”, Dominic Sandbrook, Oct 12). In 1885 the state acquired Dover House, the magnificent mansion in Whitehall where Byron had seduced Lady Caroline Lamb. The cabinet urged Gladsone to turn it into a prime ministerial residence worthy of a great country. He refused, saying his wife couldn’t face all the entertaining that would be involved. The building became the home of the newly created Scottish Office, for which it was much too big.
Lord Lexden
House of Lords
11/10/24 - Disraeli's sleepy support for trade unions
The New Statesman
Robert Colls (The Critics, 20 September) ascribes the legal immunities that trade unions enjoyed before Thatcher to “Liberal Acts of 1871, 1875 and 1906”. The 1875 legislation, which completed the decriminalisation of trade unions, was passed by Disraeli’s second government. Disraeli hoped the legislation “would gain and retain for the Conservatives the lasting affection of the working classes”. But he took little interest in it, falling asleep in cabinet when it was under discussion.
Alistair Lexden, Conservative Party historian
House of Lords
11/10/24 - "Giving up what one has is always a bad thing"
The Daily Telegraph
SIR-- Charles Moore (Notebook, October 8) states, apropos the ceding of the Chagos Islands to Mauritius, that James Cleverly as foreign secretary “gave the issue a push in the wrong direction”.
That is how Queen Victoria felt when her foreign secretary, Lord Salisbury, told her in June 1890 that he was thinking of giving Heligoland, an island of great strategic importance at the mouth of the Keil Canal, to Germany.
She said it was wrong to hand over the 2,000 British subjects living on the island “to an unscrupulous despotic Government like the German without first consulting them. The next thing will be to propose to give up Gibraltar.”
But Salisbury rallied the Cabinet behind the plan, which went ahead. Mauritius may not resemble the Kaiser’s Germany, but the 2,000 or so Chagossians should have been properly consulted by Mr Cleverly and his Labour successor. They would probably agree with the great Queen-Empress that “giving up what one has is always a bad thing.”
Lord Lexden
London SW1
05/10/24 - Disraeli never said it!
The Spectator
Sir: Visitors to Hughenden would be misled if they were told that Disraeli invented ‘One Nation’ (Notes, 21 September). The famous words were first used by Stanley Baldwin after the Tories’ greatest ever election victory a century ago. Speaking in the Royal Albert Hall on 4 December 1924, Baldwin called on the party to show that it was ‘Unionist in the sense that we stand for the union of those two nations of which Disraeli spoke two generations ago: union among our own people to make one nation of our people at home which, if secured, nothing else matters in the world.’
Alistair Lexden
House of Lords, London SW1
01/10/24 - The Conservative Party in better days
The Critic
Paul Goodman (REVIVE THE ROOTS, AUG/SEPT) exaggerates a little: Richard Holden, a charming former party official and special adviser, was the ninth, not the eleventh, person to serve as Conservative Party Chairman during the last five years, all of whom did well to avoid becoming mere chairs (a term now used everywhere in the House of Lords).
However, the first nine holders of the post, created in 1911, presided over Conservative Central Office for a total of 35 years. That would be a useful historical point for the next Conservative leader to bear in mind.
As for reversing the decline in party membership, Goodman slightly underestimates the glorious total achieved in the early 1950s. There were 2.8 million members in England and Wales. Scotland took the total to over 3 million.
I am not sure that the 90,000 or so members of the Ulster Unionist Party ought to be excluded. The Ulster Unionists were then fully integrated into all aspects of the Conservative Party’s life. In the era of the great Lord Woolton the Conservative and Unionist Party flourished in all parts of one British nation. Could that ever be achieved again?
Alistair Lexden
House of Lords
19/08/24 - Starmer's free gifts
The Times
Sir, A hundred years ago Ramsay MacDonald, the first Labour prime minister, accepted a Daimler and £40,000 in company shares from a longstanding wealthy supporter. The donor wanted to make life easier for a man with little money. At the first hint of public criticism MacDonald returned the gifts. How sad that a century later a Labour leader (letters, Sep 17) should have sunk to the level of Boris Johnson.
Lord Lexden
Conservative Party historian
London SW1
23/08/24 - Gladstone and Slavery
The Daily Telegraph
SIR - “Decolonisation training experts” in Wales (report, August 20) will find nothing in Gladstone’s Library at Hawarden to shock them as they go about the absurd work of persecuting the dead over their links with slavery.
In 1833, put up to it by his father, the 24-year-old William Gladstone, then a Tory MP, spoke in defence of the owners of sugar plantations in the West Indies—of which his father was one.
He soon repented of his folly over “this awful and solemn question”, seeking forgiveness from William Wilberforce, the great anti-slavery campaigner, shortly before the latter’s death in July 1833.
In 1839 Gladstone became one of the founders of the Society for the Extinction of the Slave Trade and the Civilisation of Africa. Later he denounced slavery in the American confederate states as “detestable.” The “training experts” should train themselves by doing some basic historical research.
Lord Lexden
London SW1
30/07/24 - In defence of a Conservative conservationist
The Spectator
Sir: Chris Guyver (Letter, 13 July) maligns Sir Samuel Hoare, one of Neville Chamberlain’s closest colleagues in the extension of the welfare state during the interwar years. He did not ‘purloin’ Soane’s Ionic pillars (eight of them, not four); he rescued them from destruction. He also saved some magnificent features from the demolished Nuthall Temple near Nottingham, known as Britain’s Rotonda, including some superb Tijou iron work. Few people cared more about conservation than Hoare.
Alistair Lexden
House of Lords, London SW1
06/07/24 - A great Prime Minister's early death
The Spectator
Sir: Richard Symington errs in stating that the Younger Pitt died of liver disease (Letter, 22 June). The surviving medical records point strongly to gastric or duodenal ulceration, which can now be cured in a few days by antibiotic and acid-reducing drugs.
Alistair Lexden
London SW1
24/06/24 - Labour's education tax: sheer prejudice against independent schools
The Times
Sir, Labour says that its VAT levy on independent schools will be included in its first finance bill (report, Jun 21). Rachel Reeves claims to set great store by the verdict of the Office for Budget Responsibility on her plans and says she will not implement a budget until it has considered them. But what if the OBR finds that instead of raising new resources for the recruitment of extra teachers, the education tax will add to the state sector’s overall costs by driving large numbers of independent school pupils into it? A fiscally responsible government would at that point abandon the tax. If it persisted, it would show that the policy was driven by sheer prejudice against independent schools.Labour must make its position on this clear.
Lord Lexden
President, Independent Schools Association
07/06/24 - Selecting candidates at short notice
The Times
Sir, Are we going back to the era of the pocket borough? It was common enough 200 years ago for constituencies to get MPs without reference to the wishes of local people. It would seem that the Conservative Party today sees merit in that practice (“Backlash as safe seat is given to Tory chairman”, Jun 6). In 1998 the party agreed a constitution which was supposed to make it open and democratic. In reality, its internal affairs at national level are largely under the control of unaccountable, short-term officials, working alongside an appointed party chairman who is often a transient and embarrassed phantom, in Disraeli’s phrase.
Lord Lexden
Conservative Party historian
18/05/24 - The man Lord Randolph forgot
The Daily Telegraph
SIR-- George Goschen, who was made a viscount in 1900 on his retirement after a long political career, would have been appalled that Seacox House, which he bulit in 1871, should have passed into the hands of the Russians, enabling them to endanger the security of his country (“Secrets of the Kent Kremlin: Putin’s English spy mansion”, report, May 9). The great imperialist Lord Milner praised Goschen for his “ardent, unquenchable, almost boyish, patriotism.” He could not stand the thought that Ireland might be separated from the rest of the United Kingdom. He deserted Gladstone’s Liberals to fight Irish home rule. Queen Victoria would have happily made him prime minister in 1885-6 if he had been able to muster sufficient political support.
He is recalled today only as a result of Lord Randolph Churchill’s famous quip that “he forgot Goschen” when he tendered his resignation as Chancellor of the Exchequer in December 1886, believing that he was irreplaceable. Goschen ought to be remembered as a tireless defender of Britain’s greatness and freedom.
Lord Lexden
London SW1
23/04/24 - The rebirth of Sutherland's portrait of Churchill
The Daily Telegraph
SIR -- Graham Sutherland’s preliminary work for his controversial portrait of Churchill possesses all the qualities which made this great artist so famous (“Draft portrait destroyed by Churchill on sale for £800k”, report,17 April).
The finished portrait was later carefully recreated by a naturalised Englishman, Albrecht von Leyden MBE (1905-94), who had a huge admiration for both the painter and his subject. He felt strongly that the portrait ought not to be lost for ever.
Using Sutherland’s various preparatory sketches and detailed notes provided by his widow, von Leyden painted a faithful copy in 1981. He explained that his aim was above all to capture Churchill’s “defiance, resolution and contempt [for Hitler], which I felt sure had been the purpose of Graham Sutherland.” This picture, so painstakingly done, was presented to the Carlton Club in 1991, where it remains. Churchill’s daughter, Lady Soames, came to see it and agreed that the club should “act as its guardian”.
Lord Lexden
Co-author, The Destruction and Rebirth of Sutherland’s Portrait of Churchill (2016)
London SW1
26/03/24 - Women at the Carlton
The Daily Telegraph
SIR -- “Even places like the Carlton”, Ed Cumming notes, have admitted women as members (Features, March 22).
The Carlton Club certainly took its time. From the 1920s until 1958, a separate Ladies’ Carlton Club existed, lavishly equipped with squash courts and a swimming pool.
Agitation for a change in the Carlton’s rules began after Margaret Thatcher became Conservative leader in 1975. The Carlton got round the immediate problem by making her an honorary member, just like all her predecessors, since, curiously, women were not barred from that category of membership.
Two years later, women started to be admitted as associate members, paying a lower subscription - much to delight of the financially prudent among them. By the 1990s their admission as full members had gained wide support, creating bitter division within the club. A number of members resigned. Two votes in 1998 and another in the year 2000 produced a majority for change, but not the two-thirds majority that the Club’s rules stipulated.
That was finally obtained in 2007, the year of the Club’s 175th anniversary.
Lord Lexden
Co-author The Carlton Club 1832-2007 (2007)
London SW1
12/03/24 - Balfour and Palestine
The Times
Sir, Trinity College, Cambridge, might have been expected to condemn rather than merely “regret” the serious damage done to its portrait of Arthur Balfour, a formidable Tory intellectual who was a conscientious Chancellor of Cambridge University for 11 years (“Portrait of Balfour ripped and defaced by pro-Palestinian group”, Mar 9). The 1917 Balfour Declaration did not begin “the ethnic cleansing of Palestine”, as the vandals assert. Its author envisaged no more than “a small notch in what are now Arab territories being given to a people who for hundreds of years have been separated from them.” He hoped for “sympathetic goodwill on the part of Jew and Arab” to develop their common home.
Lord Lexden
Conservative Party historian
06/03/24 - Would the Queen have smiled?
The Daily Telegraph
SIR -- Queen Victoria was notoriously greedy. When her doctor tried to put her on a diet, she dutifully ate his healthy choices in addition to her normal huge meals.
One of the few things she did not care for was jam. She would have regarded it as quite unsuitable as an adornment for the marble bust of her in Glasgow (report, March 4). She loved orange jelly. If the environmental protesters had chosen that favourite food, she might have been amused.
Lord Lexden
London SW1
07/02/24 - Kings and cancer
The Times
Sir, It is immensely poignant that the King’s cancer diagnosis should have been announced the day before the 72nd anniversary of the sudden death of his grandfather, George VI, who suffered from cancer. Though he had undergone a serious operation to remove most of his left lung the previous September, he was left in the dark by his doctors about his condition. Winston Churchill, then prime minister, seems to have been almost the only person who knew the truth. Circumstances today are very different. King Charles will be kept properly informed by his doctors as his treatment proceeds, with an infinitely greater chance of success.
Lord Lexden
Conservative Party historian
03/02/24 - No united Ireland
The Daily Telegraph
SIR -- The excellent Ruth Dudley Edwards brings good news of Sinn Fein’s growing difficulties in the Irish Republic (Comment, February 1).
In Northern Ireland, its acquisition of the post of first minister on the return of devolved government will produce much confident talk about the inevitability of a united Ireland. The reality, as polls show, is that supporters of the Union, among whom are many Roman Catholics, outnumber those who want to leave it by two to one.
The Unionist majority can be expected to grow, since Sinn Fein seems unable to produce competent ministers. It has never managed to bring forward a budget capable of gaining the support of the Northern Ireland Assembly. Good government will depend on the Unionist parties in the Assembly. They deserve the wholehearted backing of Conservatives in Parliament, who should remember the full name of their party: Conservative and Unionist.
Airey Neave, for whom I worked long ago, never forgot his party’s overriding purpose.
Lord Lexden
London SW1
20/01/24 - Stepping out - backwards
The Daily Telegraph
SIR -- The ancient office of Lord Chamberlain will soon have a fresh incumbent (report, January 16).
The new holder of this august post will no doubt be relieved to know that about eight years ago the duties ceased to include walking backwards before the Sovereign at state functions. Those who were quite good at it in the past sometimes had to cope with an unruly companion, the Lord Steward.
Viscount Sandhurst, a very successful Lord Chamberlain under George V, recorded in his diary what happened at a state banquet for the President of Brazil in May 1919: “the long walk backwards from the Bow Room where the King and Queen received to the Ball Room I managed all right, but Farquhar [Lord Steward] was awful. Had it been a race Farquhar would have been disqualified for bumping and he was never in step. He bumped me, then recoiled and bumped again.”
Farquhar, about whom I have published a short biography, survived for another three years before finally being sacked.
Lord Lexden
London SW1