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“... Patrick Cosgrave is a well-known political journalist who has been within and without the Conservative Party for many years. He has played Boswell to Margaret Thatcher’s Johnson, having come in from the cold, as it were, of the Heath years. He has now written a book about Peter Carrington, who resigned, of course, as Foreign Minister after the Argentines invaded the Falklands in April 1982 ...”

“... Jeffrey Archer has taken to books as other men to property or publishing: as a way to get rich. As is well known, he wrote Not a Penny More, Not a Penny Less in order to escape the coils of bankruptcy and to pay his debts. That he should have done so triumphantly is a measure of his guts and application. But courage in adversity is one thing, literary merit quite another ...”

“... Has anyone ever been unkind in public about Bill Deedes? I rather doubt it. I was in the House of Commons with him from 1959 until 1964, and also had the occasional dealing with him when he presided over Hartwell’s Telegraph. In the House, he struck a newcomer as the ideal backbencher. He was intelligent (for a Tory, that is), enjoyed an excess of charm, and was a moderate in a party that was beginning to lose patience with Harold Macmillan ...”

“... bridges since then. The Conservative Party has changed in social composition, policy and style. Julian Critchley puts it quite brutally: ‘As Mrs Thatcher has gone up in the world, so the party has come down.’ The Knights of the Shires have given way to the Knights of the Suburbs. That change is probably permanent. Only four of her cabinet ministers ...”

“... saw as the begetters of that defeat. His survivors might usefully heed his advice. The subject of Julian Critchley’s unauthorised biography ranks as a loser at least for the moment. Michael Heseltine may have stormed out of the Thatcher Cabinet over the Westland affair, he may have no power base in the Commons, but in his biographer’s estimate at ...”

“... In a chapter called ‘Etonians and Estonians’, the home team emerge as comfortable winners. Julian Critchley, that eloquent chronicler of a ‘peasants’ revolt’ among Conservative MPs during his own career, is brought on to recite his party piece about how he was reprimanded in the late Fifties for wearing suede shoes in the division lobby. The ...”

“... to Noel Picarda, a Liberal, though I’m fairly certain it was said by Heseltine’s old friend Julian Critchley. These speeches take an enormous amount out of him. He was desperate to prove that his heart attack in the summer of 1993 was caused by a blockage rather than a weakness in the heart itself. However, he took his doctors’ advice and skipped ...”

“... and happy with that arrangement. She was dubbed ‘anti-family’, and abused accordingly. Julian Critchley, one of the Whitbread judges, wrote an article in which he blamed the ‘Corps of Lady Novelists’ for her victory. The book, he said, ‘resembles the Life of Jackie Charlton as written by Beryl Bainbridge’. He clearly meant this as a ...”

“... described so poignantly by the organisation’s elegist, the anti-Thatcherite Tory ‘wet’ Julian Critchley, in his charming memoir A Bag of Boiled Sweets. The life of a Young Conservative was an endless whirl of Saturday night dances, whist drives and tennis parties. The only essential requirement for a member, it seems, was a lack of interest in ...”

“... and unrelievedly earnest material you may seriously damage your brain. One has to pick up the Critchley volume to remind oneself that politics is often funny. Critchley bids an appalled farewell to his colleagues, ‘Mother’ Teresa Gorman, ‘Little Norm’ Lamont, ‘Big Norm’ Tebbit and all the rest: John ...”

“... explanation follows in some way from the second. Whatever Happened to the Tories and, even more, Julian Critchley’s Collapse of Stout Party (also written from the left of the Conservative Party)* cause one to reflect on the attitudes of the Party’s leadership to its rank and file. Most party leaders are, as Gilmour argues, nervous of their ...”