As the party that has won wars, reversed recessions and held prime ministerial power more times than any other, the Conservatives have played an undoubtedly crucial role in the shaping of contemporary British society. And yet, the leaders who have stood at its helm - from Sir Robert Peel to David Cameron, via Benjamin Disraeli, Winston Churchill and Margaret Thatcher - have steered the party vessel with enormously varying degrees of success. With the widening of the franchise, revolutionary changes to social values and the growing ubiquity of the media, the requirements, techniques and goals of Conservative leadership since the party's nineteenth-century factional breakaway have been forced to evolve almost beyond recognition - and not all its leaders have managed to keep up. This comprehensive and enlightening book considers the attributes and achievements of each leader in the context of their respective time and diplomatic landscape, offering a compelling analytical framework by which they may be judged, detailed personal biographies from some of the country's foremost political critics, and exclusive interviews with former leaders themselves. An indispensable contribution to the study of party leadership, British Conservative Leaders is the essential guide to understanding British political history and governance through the prism of those who created it.

This book explores the ways in which the emergence of the ‘new’ daily mass press of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries represented a hugely significant period in histories of both the British press and the British political system. Drawing on a parallel analysis of election-time newspaper content and archived political correspondence, the author argues that the ‘new dailies’ were a welcome and vibrant addition to the mass political culture that existed in Britain prior to World War 1. Chapters explore the ways in which the three ‘new dailies’ – Mail, Express, and Mirror – represented political news during the four general elections of the period; how their content intersected with, and became a part of, the mass consumer culture of pre-Great War Britain; and the differing ways political parties reacted to this new press, and what those reactions said about broader political attitudes towards the worth of ‘mass’ political communication. This book will be of interest to students and scholars of media history, British popular politics, journalism history, and media studies.

Part of the Prime Ministers Series, Law was a Conservative who opposed Home rule for Ireland

"A guide to the press of the United Kingdom and to the principal publications of Europe, Australia, the Far East, Gulf States, and the U.S.A.

In the late 1890s, Britain was basking in the high noon of empire, albeit with the sobering experience of the Boer War just around the corner. By 1956, the year of the Suez debacle and less than a lifetime later, the age of empire was drawing rapidly to a close and Britain's position as an independent great power was over. In between, the country had experienced two devastating world wars. India--the jewel in her imperial crown--had gained independence. And there had been far-reaching changes on the domestic front: the birth of the welfare state, full men's (and eventually women's) suffrage, and the foundation of the National Health Service, to name but a few. Throughout this momentous period, the Oxford Union, the world's most famous debating society, continued to meet to debate and discuss the changing world around them. Sometimes their debates had important repercussions in the wider world -- such as the notorious 'King and Country' debate of 1933 which made headlines around the globe and which Winston Churchill described as that 'abject, squalid, shameless avowal.' More often than not, the debates had merely a local impact, even if among the debaters were many of the leaders, thinkers, and opinion formers of the future, figures such as Harold Macmillan, Archbishop Temple, Edward Heath, and Tony Benn. In The Golden Talking Shop, former Parliamentary sketch writer (and Union member) Edward Pearce tells the story of Britain--and the world--in the first half of the twentieth century as seen from the perspective of these Union debates: sometimes shocking, sometimes wittily amusing, and often both. The students do most of the talking, along the way revealing the changing preoccupations, prejudices, and assumptions of their changing times. A distinct pre-First World War fashion for Social Darwinism is in due course replaced by a widespread 1930s penchant for Stalinism, with civilized opinion reliably breaking in on occasion too. Above all, browsing these debates, taken straight from another age, gives the reader a vivid, sometimes piquant, sense of a Britain which is now passing from living memory--and serves as a powerful reminder of the ways in which the past and its attitudes really are a foreign country.