Themes: Leaders
‘Jeremy is Innocent’ : The Life and Times of Jeremy Thorpe and Marion Thorpe
Jeremy Thorpe led the Liberal Party over three general elections from 1967 to 1976. Immensely charismatic, under his leadership the Liberal vote at general elections more than doubled. Yet following a scandal, his career ended in a criminal court case. Why? On the fiftieth anniversary of Thorpe’s rise to the party leadership, Ronald Porter (obituarist…
Lloyd George in cartoons
Review of Alan Mumford, David Lloyd George: A Biography in Cartoons (Matador, 2014).
Jeremy’s story
Review of Michael Bloch, Jeremy Thorpe (Little, Brown, 2014).
Report: Liberal leaders and leadership
Report of the Conference fringe meeting, 20 September 2015, with Simon Hughes, Paul Tyler and Lynne Featherstone.
The legacy of Roy Jenkins
NOTE: START TIME CHANGED TO 7.00pm Roy Jenkins is best remembered in Liberal Democrat circles as one of the ‘Gang of Four’ who established the Social Democratic Party, the SDP’s first leader, and then a staunch supporter of merger with the Liberal Party. But even as a Labour politician he had a liberal record. In…
First biography of William George
Review of Peter Rowland, Lloyd George’s Tada – the one father he never knew! (PublishNation, 2014).
Authoritative new biography of ‘the goat’
Review of Travis L. Crosby, The Unknown Lloyd George: a Statesman in Conflict (I. B. Tauris, 2014).
Leading the Liberals
Review of Duncan Brack, Robert Ingham and Tony Little (eds.), British Liberal Leaders: Leaders of the Liberal Party, SDP and Liberal Democrats since 1828 (Biteback Publishing, 2015).
Liberal leaders and leadership
Party leaders matter: they embody a party’s present, while also shaping its future. This is particularly important in the values-based Liberal tradition. A total of twenty-five individuals led the Liberal Party, SDP and Liberal Democrats between Earl Grey’s assumption of the leadership of the Whig opposition in 1828 and Nick Clegg’s resignation in 2015. What did it take to…
Lloyd George and Churchill as war leaders
A comparison of the two great British wartime leaders of the twentieth century.