Boris Johnson’s dramatic request to The Queen on 28 August to prorogue Parliament will be the subject of endless debate among commentators, constitutional experts and historians for years to come.

Apart from his school magazine which he edited, Alistair Lexden first appeared in print in 1969—with an edited  memoir of Hugh Holmes, Conservative Attorney-General for Ireland in the 1880s, and a book review in The Belfast Telegraph. Other publications followed over the ensuing fifty years.

In an article in The Times on August 23, Professor Robert Tombs, historian and well-known ardent Brexiteer, accused opponents of a no deal Brexit  in the Commons of “plotting some sort of parliamentary coup against a government trying to carry out a policy approved by the electorate”.

March this year brought the fortieth anniversary of Airey Neave’s murder. It was marked by the publication of a biography by Patrick Bishop, which I reviewed for Parliament’s House Magazine and, at slightly greater length, for the ConservativeHome website.

On I August (see below )in the aftermath of the conviction of Carl Beech (better known as ‘Nick the fantasist’), Alistair Lexden renewed his call for an independent inquiry into the investigation of allegations against Sir Edward Heath.

In 1992, Robert Blake, the distinguished historian and biographer, compiled The Sayings of Disraeli, a slim volume containing the famous Tory leader’s timeless observations on life and politics.

On 22 July, Carl Beech, who gained notoriety under the pseudonym ‘Nick’, was sentenced to eighteen years’ imprisonment for fraud and perverting the course of justice.

During the last four years, outrage has been expressed in many quarters—ecclesiastical, academic, political and journalistic—about the Church of England’s appalling  treatment of one of its greatest bishops, George Bell.  An important new book underlines Bell’s enduring significance on the world

“The Conservative Party is the national party or it is nothing”, Disraeli famously declared in 1867. Its duty to represent the interests of the whole nation was, however, first set out by the man whose career Disraeli destroyed, Sir Robert Peel, as Alistair Lexden pointed out in a letter in The Daily Telegraph on July 26.

Harold Macmillan’s dismissal of seven members of his Cabinet in 1962 was unprecedented. On July 24, Boris Johnson sacked eleven. Alistair Lexden described what is now the second biggest Cabinet purge in a letter in The Times on July 26.