Mrs May’s unprecedented 230-vote defeat on 15 January prompted the following letter, published in The Times on 17 January. (One point was unintentionally omitted: the largest Commons defeat in the nineteenth century.
The Whitbread Prize is the top award for the 506 schools which belong to the Independent Schools Association (ISA), of which Alistair Lexden is President. It recognises outstanding academic achievement, contribution to school life and service in the wider community.
Shortly before he died in December, Paddy Ashdown, an accomplished author, published an important and inspiring book on the internal German resistance to Hitler. Many brave people paid a very high price for their courage.
One day in 1947, while Churchill was painting at Chartwell, the ghost of his father suddenly appeared. They had a long and fascinating conversation, which Churchill wrote down afterwards.
An article in the final issue of The Spectator for last year suggested that Lords reform might become a serious possibility after Brexit. Alistair Lexden takes a different view, as he explained in the main letter in the first issue of the magazine for 2019.
In September, Lord Lexden delivered an address following the unveiling of a statue of Stanley Baldwin in Bewdley, recalling the character and the achievements of the three-time Prime Minister and Conservative Party leader for fourteen years from 1923 to 1937.
On a number of occasions in the last few years, Alistair Lexden has drawn attention to a neglected example of unduly generous prime ministerial patronage. He returned to the issue in his last letter of 2018, which was published in The Times on December 29.
Throughout the year, Alistair Lexden has expressed outrage about the damage done to the reputations of a former Prime Minister and a world-famous Anglican Bishop—Edward Heath and George Bell—by unsubstantiated allegations of child sex abuse made after their deaths.
The main lesson perhaps is that an incumbent leader needs an overwhelming majority in order to silence his or her critics, and bring the Party back under reasonably firm control.
