Conservative Party Uk Politicians

"Nadine Dorries has exposed the split in the Conservative party between vulgarity and conformity. The decision of the MP for Mid Bedfordshire to go on I'm a Celebrity...Get Me Out of Here! is an astonishingly rude attack on the well-bred, self-controlled establishment headed by David Cameron."

""The slide" began in 2012, after Dorries' appearance on I'm a Celebrity, when eating ostrich anus seemingly went to her head."

"It is a modus operandi established by your allies which has targeted Boris Johnson, transferred to Liz Truss and now moved on to me. But I have not been a Prime Minister. I do not have security or protection. Attacks from people, led by you, declared open season on myself and the past weeks have resulted in the police having to visit my home and contact me on a number of occasions due to threats to my person. Since you took office a year ago, the country is run by a zombie Parliament where nothing meaningful has happened. What exactly has been done or have you achieved? You hold the office of Prime Minister unelected, without a single vote, not even from your own MPs. You have no mandate from the people and the government is adrift. You have squandered the goodwill of the nation, for what?"

"It is a fact that there is no affection for Keir Starmer out on the doorstep. He does not have the winning X factor qualities of a Thatcher, Blair or a Boris Johnson, and sadly, prime minister, neither do you."

"I am grateful for your personal phone call on the morning you appointed your cabinet in October, even if I declined to take the call."

"[As the Conservative candidate for Mid-Bedfordshire in 2005] The circumstances of this selection are disputed: Dorries has since claimed that the candidate shortlist was made up mostly of men, whereas contemporary reports say it was largely women. This is noteworthy because, before she was selected, Dorries advocated all-women shortlists, but after her election she criticised David Cameron when he floated the idea of using them. Changing her mind has been a feature of Dorries's political career. She argued and voted against gay marriage, for example, dismissing it as a policy pursued "by the metro elite gay activists". She has since said that her opposition to the gay marriage bill was her "biggest regret"."

"[T]hey [the privileges committee] have nothing. He protested his innocence all along and he was right. It was a gross miscarriage of justice, at the very least. (Twitter, 3 March 2023)."

"I don’t think there was ever a world in which this committee was going to find Boris innocent. The committee have demonstrated very clearly that they have decided early on to find him guilty. (TalkTV, 23 March 2023)."

"There is perhaps an element of the unreliable narrator about the part-time novelist."

"[W]e also need to keep a close eye on the careers of the Conservative MPs who sat on that committee. Do they suddenly find themselves on chicken runs into safe seats? Gongs? Were promises made? We need to know if they were. Justice has to be seen to be done at all levels of this process. (Twitter, 15 June 2023)."

"[On how well Channel 5 was doing] they were privatised a small number of years ago, three years ago, five years ago maybe."

"There is a process and the last thing I would want to do would be to cause a by-election in my constituency."

"I can personally tell you that the Prime Minister, when he stands at the despatch box and makes quotes like the one you just quoted, is because the researchers and his advisers will have given him that quote, and that's... and he was truthful, to the best of his knowledge, when he made that quote [...] The Prime Minister does tell the truth."

"It is my belief that when Rishi Sunak told Boris Johnson he would sign off the list returned to him by Holac, he was using weasel words [...] He already knew who was and wasn't on that list because he had engineered it via his aide [[w:James Forsyth (journalist)|[James] Forsyth]]. I'm not going to lie. I believe sinister forces conspired against me and have left me heartbroken - but that emotion gives me all the strength I need to keep on fighting."

"This deal gives us no voice, no votes, no MEPs, no commissioner."

"This expert legal opinion shows that the inquiry was a biased, Kafkaesque witch hunt – it should now be halted before it does any more damage. (Daily Mail, 1 September 2022)."

"As complex as it is to calibrate how much Dorries can take credit for normalising extreme MP moonlighting, ... her achievement in juggling political duties with the relentless production of novels, a third career on TalkTV and a fourth one as a Daily Mail columnist, looks almost uniquely harsh on affected constituents. Her website features, in the absence of surgery dates and political content, promotions of her TV slots and books. Add to that her all-purpose put-down (her own money being proletarian) of "posh boys", her employment on the public payroll of two daughters, her loyalty to the groper and wife-beater Stanley Johnson and a sideline in aggressive and misleading tweets, and you can almost understand Dorries’s incredulity on being finally, after all that, thwarted. At the point she was denied her peerage, she hadn't even been condemned by the privileges committee for her part in an "unprecedented and coordinated" attack on its members!"

"[On the question of privatising Channel 4, later an abandoned policy] I would argue that to say that just because Channel 4's been established as a public service broadcaster, and just because it's in receipt of public money, we should never kind of audit the future of Channel 4 and we should never evaluate how Channel 4 looks in the future, and whether or not it's a sustainable and valuable model, it’s quite right that the Government should do that."

"My blog is 70% fiction and 30% fact. It is written as a tool to enable my constituents to know me better and to reassure them of my commitment to Mid Bedfordshire. I rely heavily on poetic licence and frequently replace one place name/event/fact with another."

"Unfortunately, I think that not only are Cameron and Osborne two posh boys who don't know the price of milk, but they are two arrogant posh boys who show no remorse, no contrition, and no passion to want to understand the lives of others - and that is their real crime."

"[In the 2005–2010 parliament, it was] very difficult to talk about the family unit, and to talk about mothers and children . . . as the foundation of society, because it was seen as a very unsexy, untrendy thing to do and the opposite of what a woman should be doing."

"Gay marriage is a policy which has been pursued by the metro elite gay activists and needs to be put into the same bin [as reform of the House of Lords]."

"If we were in government and David [Cameron] didn't give me a front bench position, I would barricade myself inside his office until he did."

"I started blogging because I believe my constituents, who pay me, have a right to know what I get up to in Westminster. Many MPs are so secretive about how they spend their time but I say b******s to that."

"Be seen within a mile of my daughters and I will nail your balls to the floor... using your own front teeth. Do you get that?"

"Do you know the people who have no voice in this country? Who are never written about, who journalists never talk about? The mums. Mums who decide that they will give up their careers and stay at home and look after their children."

"On the pro-life side of the fence, the public takes little notice of those who want to abolish abortion. They are dismissed as extremists. If I were to argue that all abortions should be banned, the ethical discussions would go round in circles because one person’s opinion is as valid as another's. My view is that the only way forward is to argue for a reduction in the time limit."

"I am not an MP for any reason other than because God wants me to be. There is nothing I did that got me here; it is what God did. There is nothing amazing or special about me, I am just a conduit for God to use."

"[On relaxed EU restrictions on immigration from Bulgaria and Romania] There has been no tidal wave but there might be tomorrow, there might be next year - we don't know – and that is the problem. We could have a tidal wave from Yugoslavia."

"It has now been 395 days since the MP spoke in the Commons, 102 days since she voted and a remarkable three years and five months since she held a surgery — though her local office has continued to function. In that time, one pandemic and two prime ministers have been defeated. In addition, Dorries is reported to live 100 miles away from her constituency, in Tewkesbury, Gloucestershire."

"[H]e possessed a well-trained and imperturbable mind that could digest a mass of disjointed facts and remain clear and unconfused."

"What about Rab? Surely he was the most obvious successor. "On no account," said Macmillan. "Rab simply doesn't have it in him to be Prime Minister.""

"His was the true moderate conservatism which did so much to create the stability and prosperity of postwar Britain."

"The art of government, in his view, is to yield to the forces of change and then to harness them in time to prevent the disintegration of authority, whether in domestic politics or in international relations. In his eyes, there is no last ditch which is really worth fighting for if, by surrendering it, you can retain control of the situation."

"Butler is on the extreme left of the Tory Party and is shrewd enough to understand that they have got to...live down the reputation inherited from...the thirties...to be able to say to the electorate when the election comes, "no war: no unemployment: no cuts in social services. Just good Government". If I am right about this they will want to stay in power for three or four years, and I don't really see why they should not."

"I was always one of Rab's admirers. Of the three up and coming postulants to the succession – Eden, Rab, and Harold Macmillan – I had always favoured Rab. All three were on the progressive wing of the party. But, to my eye, Eden was too temperamental and Harold too unpredictable in other ways. I admired Rab's almost oriental inscrutability, his subtle mind, and his intellectual approach to practical politics. However, I never numbered candour amongst his virtues."

"I wish you to go on with your delicate manner of answering Parliamentary Questions without giving anything away."

"Rab said he thought that the good clean tradition of English politics, that of Pitt as opposed to Fox, had been sold to the greatest adventurer of modern political history. He had tried earnestly and long to persuade Halifax to accept the Premiership, but he had failed. He believed this sudden coup of Winston and his rabble was a serious disaster and an unnecessary one: the 'pass has been sold' by Mr. C[hamberlain], Lord Halifax and Oliver Stanley. They had weakly surrendered to a half-breed American whose main support was that of inefficient but talkative people of a similar type."

"Some would hail Rab Butler as beyond question the most important and the greatest Conservative of his generation; and certainly his continuous record as a minister or shadow minister from 1932 to 1964 is a tribute to his endurance. Helped by his young lieutenants he rebuilt the Tory Party; he taxed his countrymen's income less than any other chancellor; he abolished wartime controls; and under him began the prosperity for which Macmillan claimed the credit. His admirers thought the title he chose for his memoirs exemplified his exact understanding of politics: The Art of the Possible. And yet for all his reputation among us as a liberal Conservative who had re-educated his party after 1945 as Peel did after 1832, for all his patronage of a generation of clever young Conservatives in Central Office, for all his amusing deviousness, afraid to strike yet willing, well, not to wound but to scratch, he was so cautious, so much a man of Munich that few major initiatives came from the succession of departments where he presided. He had a record that looked fine as home secretary, chancellor and foreign secretary and, of course, as minister for education: hardly a foot put wrong. But, then, some of us considered, his feet had not moved all that far. If you stride you may put a foot wrong, and Butler failed to stride into the European Community. He and Eden reinforced each other's scepticism. "Whenever I met Anthony, the sort of conversation was, 'Simply nothing doing, you know.'" On major issues he hardly ever questioned the wisdom of his advisers. The paradox remains. He could have won the 1964 election for the Tories but was the only contender for the leadership towards whom his colleagues felt lukewarm."

"Nigel Ronald...who represents one very definite section of opinion in the F[oreign] O[ffice], told me he thought Rab Butler a public danger, flabby in person and morally and mentally as well; a young man whose whole influence was that of an old one, whose inclination was to put a break on all initiative."

"I had derived from Bolingbroke an assurance that the majesty of the State might be used in the interests of the many, from Burke a belief in seeking patterns of improvement by balancing diverse interests, and from Disraeli an insistence that the two nations must become one. If my brand of Conservatism was unorthodox, I was committing heresy in remarkably good company."

"[N]ot everyone who praises liberal Conservatism actually believes in it. There is no need, for example, to impute anything so naive to Lord Butler whose object in his period of maximum effectiveness was to persuade himself and everyone else that progress and decency were as Conservative as Baldwin had said they were, and that Conservatives could provide liberal reassurance in an intellectual climate which was profoundly unsympathetic to any Conservative position. In the 1940s and 1950s Lord Butler may well have been right; it may well be that the Conservative party owes a great deal more of its present existence to his calculating intuitions than it is now willing to believe. In the last ten years, however, the climate has changed, and with the change have come intuitions quite different from those he operated with then. It has been calculation as well as instinct that has made it necessary to replace his sort of liberal Conservatism by the new Conservatism of the 1970s."

"We don't have to take this Thatcher business seriously, do we?"

"Truly Conservative policies [are] freeing markets, freeing the economy, giving the economy buoyancy, moving to liberty and the desirable goal of freeing payments and trade."

"Conservatives have always been ready to use the power of the State."

"In the past three years we have burned our identity cards, torn up our ration books, halved the number of snoopers, decimated the number of forms and said good riddance to nearly two-thirds of the remaining wartime regulations. This is the march to freedom on which we are bound. And the pace must quicken as we go forward...Within the limits of law and social justice, our aim is freedom for every man and woman to live their own lives in their own way and not have their lives lived for them by an overweening State."

"I have said on many occasions, in Parliament and elsewhere, that I am not convinced that this [the restoration of corporal punishment for young offenders] would have the effect for which its advocates hope."

"If we continue to use industrial resources for other purposes – defence, housing, etc. – thus preventing the diversion of resources to export work, the [exchange] rate will continue to fall. ... the basic idea of internal stability of prices and employment, which had dominated economic policy for so long will not be maintainable. It will not be possible to maintain stable internal prices and wages; it will not be possible to avoid unemployment. There will be a continuous process of change and readjustment and much of this will be painful."

"There are great economic opportunities ahead of us. If we are sensible, we can have rising production and rising standards of living without constantly rising prices. Why should we not aim to double our standard of living in the next 20 years, and still have our money as valuable then as now? The faster we modernize and expand our productive capacity, the more we shall be able to increase the national wealth."

"The Government will have to give consideration to the question of how much this inflow can be assimilated into our society at the present time. If you give the Government a little longer, we shall try to find a solution as friendly to these people as we can and not based on colour prejudice alone."