Controversy has arisen over the impact of the new streamlined welfare payment, universal credit, on the provision of free school meals. Critics say that the number of children in poor families getting a good free meal at school will drop sharply.
Patrick Donner, a Second World War RAF pilot and Tory MP, wrote in his memoirs: “must not the final verdict be that Neville Chamberlain and Winston Churchill between them saved this country? Neither statesman would have achieved our salvation without the other”.
Contrary to widespread belief, independent schools have never disdained contact with their counterparts in the state sector. There has never been a “Berlin Wall” between them, as some politicians have alleged.
Many people have said that he did. In a recent interview, reported in The Daily Telegraph on 2 March, his 97-year-old niece, Lady Avon (widow of Anthony Eden), denied that his consumption was out of the ordinary.
Between December 1916 and October 1922 the Conservative Party (known at this period as the Unionist Party) was the largest partner in a coalition government led by Lloyd George. The government fell on 19 October 1922 after a famous meeting of Unionist MPs at the Carlton Club.
According to an article in the London Evening Standard on 15 February, support for lowering the voting age to 16 is growing among Conservative MPs, though the government has ruled out any change.
The centenary of the 1918 Representation of the People Act, which extended the right to vote in parliamentary elections to a limited number of women, has given Alistair Lexden several opportunities to draw attention to the most important person in the long campaign for women’s suffrage, Dame Mill
