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.
29/07/22 - Supermac and his successor
The Times
Sir, William Hague does Harold Macmillan an injustice in saying that he did not “think highly of Douglas-Home’s tenure”. Macmillan noted in his diary on April 25, 1964, that “Alec is doing awfully well --- making fine speeches and giving a splendid lead.” After the narrow Tory election defeat the following October, he wrote: “Alec has done as well as anyone could have done.” Supermac is an exception to the rule that prime ministers are unimpressed by their successors.
Lord Lexden
Conservative Party historian
19/07/22 - Another Mordaunt
The Daily Telegraph
SIR- Only once before has a Mordaunt commanded newspaper headlines.
In February 1870 the country was riveted as details of the scandalous life of Lady Harriet Mordaunt unfolded in court when her husband petitioned for divorce. Her many lovers included the Prince of Wales, later Edward VII, who gave her a couple of white ponies, which her husband shot in front of her.
In court the heir to the throne denied “any improper familiarity or criminal act” with her. Few believed him. Sir Charles Mordaunt did not get his divorce. “The unfortunate, crazy Lady Mordaunt”, in Queen Victoria’s words, was judged unfit to testify in her defence, She spent the rest of her life in confinement as a lunatic.
The Tory leadership candidate does not seem to be related to her.
Lord Lexden
London SW1
08/07/22 - The discredited Johnson
The Times
Sir, Do we need to tighten “Britain’s loose constitutional arrangements” to stop a discredited prime minister remaining in office until a successor chosen? We have a bloated Privy Council of over 700 members thanks to profligate appointments by Boris Johnson and his immediate predecessors. It would help to restore the reputation of this ancient and indispensable institution if an interim prime minister were to be made subject to a vote of confidence by a small group of its most distinguished members. It is intolerable that a man like Johnson should be allowed to cling on to an office which he has tarnished so badly because his party’s MPs fail to evict him at once.
Lord Lexden
House of Lords
04/07/22 - Purge the Privy Council - starting with the Rt. Hon. Christopher Pincher
The Daily Telegraph
SIR - Surely Christopher Pincher, the disgraced deputy chief whip (report, July 1), should be removed from the Privy Council. He is lucky to be on it. Ministers outside the Cabinet, and ordinary backbenchers, have only been appointed to it in recent years.
Boris Johnson seems especially keen on this particular form of patronage, which passes largely unnoticed by those monitoring political corruption.
At the Queen’s accession the Privy Council had some 200 members, including important Commonwealth dignitaries ; the total today is over 700. A start could be made in reducing it by weeding out those who have brought discredit on themselves.
Lord Lexden
London SW1
27/06/22 - Wanted: A Stanley Baldwin for our time
The Times
Sir, A century ago the big names in the Conservative Party stayed loyal to their coalition prime minister, David Lloyd George, as his unpopularity mounted. The summer of 1922 brought an honours scandal that destroyed Lloyd George’s moral authority. At the famous Carlton Club meeting that October, a little- known cabinet minister, Stanley Baldwin, broke ranks with his colleagues. He described the prime minister as “a dynamic force” who had left “a section of our party hopelessly alienated” and would inevitably ensure that “the old Conservative Party is smashed to atoms”. A few months later Baldwin became prime minister. Could Oliver Dowden be the Baldwin de nos jours ? He has the ability, calmness and decency the country will need after today’s dynamic force has been removed.
Lord Lexden
House of Lords
13/06/22 - How Tory leaders should be chosen
The Telegraph
SIR - There should be no more votes of confidence in Boris Johnson.
Provision for such votes was introduced in 1998. They produce pyrrhic victories for unpopular, embattled prime ministers, who are rescued from defeat by the payroll vote. Theresa May discovered that in December 2018, six months before her resignation. Her successor has now been taught a similar lesson.
The change made in 1998 should be scrapped. Serious disaffection among MPs can only be overcome by a leadership election. The 1922 Committee should recast the rules so that an election is triggered when a substantial number of backbenchers—say 20 per cent—call for one.
If several rounds of voting are needed, they should take place rapidly. After all, the electors will already be very familiar with the merits and shortcomings of the candidates. Members of the party in the constituencies would be carefully consulted.
The whole process could be completed within three weeks. The Conservative Party used to pride itself on its ability to get rid of unsuccessful leaders quickly. It needs to regain the habit.
Lord Lexden
London SW1
07/06/22 - Sir Graham Brady must revise the rules
The Times
Sir, A century ago Tory MPs got rid of their coalition prime minister, David Lloyd George, and their own party leader, Austen Chamberlain, within an hour at a meeting in the Carlton Club. The party must rediscover the capacity to settle changes of leadership briskly when the need arises. This has not happened since November 1990 when overwhelming pressure was brought to bear on Mrs Thatcher by her most senior colleagues. Yesterday’s vote brings into focus once again the faulty processes by which Tory leaders are chosen. The final decision ought to rest with MPs, as it did until 2001, when an ever- shrinking party membership was given the right to select the leader. The party at large has long-established channels through which to make its views known. A tight timetable should be laid down for successive ballots by MPs, who after all are used to votes in quick succession in the Commons. Sir Graham Brady must revise the rules.
Lord Lexden
Conservative Party historian
29/05/22 - Macmillan's disappointment
The Spectator
Sir: Did Harold Macmillan really consider appointing himself provost of Eton, as Charles Moore surmises (The Spectator’s Notes, 14 May)? Alas, he never had the chance. Sir Claude Elliott, appointed in 1949, reigned throughout Macmillan’s premiership. On his retirement in 1965, Harold Wilson appointed Lord Caccia, a highly successful ambassador in Washington after Suez. Macmillan was desperately disappointed. His brilliant biographer, D.R. Thorpe, makes clear in Supermac (2010) that ‘he would have been an active provost, more so than circumstances allowed him to be as chancellor of Oxford University.’ How he would have loved presiding at dinner in Eton on one night, and in Oxford the next.
Alistair Lexden
House of Lords, London SW1
10/05/22 - A Lord in No 10 again? Or the First Baroness?
The Daily Telegraph
SIR - The last peer to be prime minister was the great Lord Salisbury, the fourth longest-serving in our history, who retired 120 years ago in 1902. It is often said that there will never be another. But there could be—sitting in the House of Commons.
Hereditary peers who were thrown out of the Lords by Tony Blair in 1999 are eligible for seats in the Commons. Since 2014, serving members of the House of Lords, including all those appointed for life, have been able to retire from it permanently at any age. Those who depart remain peers; their titles cannot be relinquished . Like the expelled hereditaries, such peers can become members of the Commons.
Lord Frost clearly hopes to be an MP (report, May 4), and probably more than a backbencher. A lord in No. 10 again is far from inconceivable. The way is also open for the first baroness to become prime minister. Lord Salisbury would have been amazed.
Lord Lexden
London SW1
20/04/22 - A great asset to the Lords
The Daily Telegraph
SIR - It is suggested that Lord Wolfson of Tredegar QC should hand back his peerage after resigning from the Government (Letters, April 15).
He won admiration and respect on all sides of the House for his mastery of all the issues within his brief. That can be said of few ministers. Hour after hour he patiently and courteously answered innumerable criticisms of the Government’s controversial Nationality and Borders Bill.
He is a great asset to the Lords, which cannot be said of all Boris Johnson’s appointments.
Lord Lexden
A Deputy Speaker, House of Lords
London SW1
18/03/22 - A disgraced Commons Speaker and a jailed Peer
The Daily Telegraph
SIR - The most appropriate way of registering strong disapproval of people in public life who betray their trust is to strip them of the honours bestowed upon them.
Now that John Bercow has been shown to be a “serial bully” and a “serial liar” (report, March 9) should he not join the short list of serious offenders, which includes Jonathan Aitken and Chris Huhne, who have been removed from the Privy Council? This could be done easily by striking off his name.
Infinitely more difficult is the withdrawal of a peerage. Though conferred by the Queen, an Act of Parliament is needed to rescind it. So Lord Ahmed, a former Labour peer who was jailed for five years last month for child sex offences, keeps his title.
The Government informed me a few days ago that they have “no plans” to introduce legislation to remove it. This is a mistake. A Bill would pass rapidly through Parliament and could provide the powers to deal with other peers who may commit grave crimes in the future.
Someone who is sent to prison can be expelled from the House of Lords. A title should not be retained in such circumstances
Lord Lexden
London SW1
09/03/22 - The colonel who became a Tory fundraiser
The Times
Colonel Aylmer—I would never have dreamt of using his first name—would not have been pleased to have been numbered among those who worked at Conservative Central Office.
He would descend upon us occasionally with his genial colleagues, a general and a brigadier, who comprised the Conservative Board of Finance. Most of their work was done in grand restaurants with a wide variety of businessmen, rustling up useful sums for Tory funds.
“Dear boy”, the Colonel would say, “I think I would have got a bigger donation today if my guest had not been so browned off about the poll tax. Could you draft a nice letter about it for me to send him?” The reward was an invitation to the Board’s lavish champagne parties at Christmas.
I doubt many honours were promised. “I really think we should do something special for our most generous friends” , he said one day. He seemed delighted when I arranged for some copies of a small book on the history of the Conservative Party to be bound in half leather for them. I often wondered how they went down with his generous friends.
18/02/22 - Calming things down at No. 10
The Daily Telegraph
SIR - Mary Biggs, whose father, Sir Freddie Bishop, was Harold Macmillan’s favourite private secretary, mentions that great Tory leader’s love of the Gilbert and Sullivan line from The Gondoliers: “Quiet, calm deliberation disentangles every knot” (Letter, February 11).
At the start of his premiership Macmillan wrote out the words on a sheet of No 10 paper, which he pinned on the door of the Cabinet Room. After a time, Bishop recalled: “he took it down and gave it to me.”
Later it reached the offices of The Spectator; when Alexander Chancellor became its editor in 1975, he found it “pinned to my office mantelpiece”, having been “purloined from the prime minister’s office.”
If it was still there when Boris Johnson became the magazine’s editor in 1999, it did not do him much good. But it would be worth a second try. If the sheet of paper survives, it should be returned to No 10 at once, and pinned on the Cabinet Room door once again. Mr and Mrs Johnson could burst into merry song: “Let us grasp the situation /Solve the complicated plot/Quiet, calm deliberation disentangles every knot.”
Lord Lexden
London SW1
14/02/22 - In defence of Anthony Eden
The Times
Sir, I doubt that at on November 4, 1956, Anthony Eden “broke down in tears as he accused his colleagues of deserting him before departing upstairs to compose himself” (leading article, Feb. 5). A cabinet meeting was held on that day. Several ministers voiced doubts about the imminent British military landings at Suez .
The prime minister took Lord Salisbury, Harold Macmillan and Rab Butler aside, telling them that “if they wouldn’t go on [supporting him] he would have to resign. Rab said if he did resign no one else could form a government”, as Clarissa Eden recorded in her diary. After that, Eden was given overwhelming backing.
Melodrama (though without the tears) was injected into these events by Rab Butler in his 1971 memoirs. He stated that Eden adjourned the meeting “to go upstairs and consider his position.” Eden challenged Butler’s version, which was not supported by any of the others present.
Lord Lexden
Conservative Party historian
05/02/22 - "Disreputable old gentlemen": Churchill on the Lords
The Spectator
Sir: Shortly after expressing wistful envy of the manner of George VI’s death on 6 February 1952 (Notes, 29 January), Churchill received a sharp intimation of his own mortality. On 21 February he lost the power of coherent speech for a few minutes.
Friends and colleagues thought he should be persuaded to see out his premiership in the Lords where he could make the occasional great speech (‘in 1952 no one but Winston could be Prime Minister in the Lords’, they said).
Churchill scoffed: ‘I should have to be the Duke of Chartwell and Randolph would be the Marquis of Toodledo.’ Lord Salisbury, who had come up with the idea, backtracked: ‘I am afraid he regards us in the Lords as a rather disreputable collection of old gentlemen.’
Alistair Lexden
House of Lords, London SW1
28/01/22 - Chamberlain and Munich
The New Statesman
Richard J Evans (Critic at Large, 21 January) appears to endorse the well-worn charge that Neville Chamberlain was “weak and unintelligent”, though Jock Colville, his private secretary in 1938, described his “brilliant” mind as “ unbelievably quick, clear and incisive.” Evans goes on to deny the existence of any evidence that Chamberlain privately distrusted Hitler, but he told Joe Kennedy, the American ambassador, that the Fuhrer was “cruel, overbearing” and “completely ruthless in any of his aims and methods”.
Chamberlain is also condemned for regarding Hitler as “a conventional European statesman” when he actually felt that if he and his cabinet “were doing business with a normal man they would have some idea of what might happen, but they were doing business with a madman.”
Most seriously, Evans dodges the central question: should Chamberlain have overruled all his military advisers and declared war in September 1938 with the country deeply divided and the Dominions unwilling to commit their forces? He would have plunged Britain into a long, devastatingly costly struggle on behalf of a state to which it had no treaty obligation, which it could not save and which would probably never be resurrected in its existing form, even if victory was eventually achieved.
Chamberlain kept firmly to the course he had set a year earlier when he told Lord Weir, his principal adviser on aviation matters: “The Air Force must go on building itself up as rapidly as possible. I hope my efforts with Germany and Italy will give us the necessary time.”
Alistair Lexden
Author, Neville Chamberlain: Redressing the Balance (2018)
House of Lords
12/01/22 - A Lady of discernment
The Times
I often sat beside Diana Farnham during services at the Chapel Royal in St James’s Palace, turning the pages of The Book of Common Prayer for her when her eyesight began to fade. “I really ought not to leave the car so far from the pavement,” she would say during our little Sunday confabulations, “but the police are very understanding.” We conducted a joint campaign to get our favourite young priest to pronounce the syllables of the word adversary correctly, achieving only partial success.
When she asked me how old I was, I docked several years from my true age, as is my custom. She looked at me incredulously. She was not a woman who could be deceived.
07/01/22 - The Prime Minister who turned down the highest order of chivalry
The Daily Telegraph
SIR - Harold Macmillan’s refusal of the Garter caused much surprise, as Charles Moore indicates (Notebook, January 4). Macmillan loved dispensing honours on a generous scale, explaining: “I take a lot of trouble over it. At least it makes all those years reading Trollope worthwhile.”
There was just one that he wanted on his resignation in 1963: “the only honour that appealed to me was the Order of Merit, which remains the sovereign’s personal gift.” In part, that was because it was the one honour held by both Lloyd George and Churchill, his greatest 20th-century predecessors .
He held out for it, turning down both an earldom and the Garter in 1964, to the Queen’s displeasure. She made him wait 12 years before giving him his heart’s desire. “Thank you, ma’am, for making an old man happy,” he told her when he finally received it in April 1976.
As to the earldom, he set that aside in 1964 with a gentle swipe at the House of Lords: “A lot of people go into a mausoleum, but there’s no need to go in prematurely”. He finally entered the “mausoleum” as Earl of Stockton in 1984 at the age of 90.
Lord Lexden
London SW1