A new history of our Party  

A new, comprehensive history of our Party has just been published. It is a profoundly important book. Its author, Robin Harris, is a highly regarded historian and writer. He has been well-known in Conservative circles since the 1980s when he was Director of the Conservative Research Department. Having, he writes, been ” stressfully on the inside” of the Party organisation, he is now “contentedly on the outside” though contentment is not a quality that those who have worked with Robin Harris readily associate with him. In some 520 pages of clear, forceful prose he draws on a wide range of (largely published) sources to provide an immensely stimulating, and often highly provocative, account of the Party’s changing fortunes-its triumphs and its setbacks-since the early nineteenth century. It was then that the modern Conservative Party began to take shape, mindful...