Tory Policy-Making
Product CodeBS002
Price£12.50
DescriptionIain Macleod, Enoch Powell, Douglas Hurd, and David Cameron all served their political apprenticeships in it. For eighty years the Conservative Research Department, the first political think-tank of the right, has put scores of young men and women from all types of background to work on preparing policies for the Party to implement in government. In this eightieth anniversary volume Alistair Cooke, the Party’s official historian, is joined by seven other leading members of the Department, past and present. They reveal the inside story of how the Party laid the foundations of a national health service in the 1930s,and of how it came to dominate British politics after 1951 and again after 1979 under Margaret Thatcher. Their inside accounts also include diverting tales about the often colourful and eccentric people who have passed through the Department. Through its work over the years the Department has contributed significantly to the tradition of progressive Conservatism on which David Cameron and his advisers are drawing as they finalise the Party’s programme for the next election.
‘David Cameron is the first Tory leader to have worked on the payroll of the Research Department...The CRD style is in .So is the CRD content..this work is interesting because it hits the right moment’
(Charles Moore, The Daily Telegraph, November 24 2009)
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