Mel Gibson is Harold Macmillan in Mad Mac 3. Spitting Image s3e1
I cannot foresee any circumstances … Spitting Image s9e2, Michael Heseltine
The Conservative Party: a bunch of snivelling, two-faced, back-stabbing weasels. Spitting Image s9e3, party broadcast
It’s me! Your exciting new prime minister. With lots of totally new policies. Spitting Image s9e4, John Major to cabinet
A lot of people are pointing at you, Mr Heseltine, and saying, Where did this rancour come from? Spitting Image s9e6, Waldon with lisp
We’re all too anonymous. We need to find some way of telling us apart. Spitting Image s11e1, John Major to Cabinet
John Major is on a winning streak. He is monarch of all he surveys. He has all the prestige and authority he needs to transform Britain. The Sun editorial 9th May 1992, cited Spitting Image s13e1
[to theme music] Norman Lamont … John Major … The Recessionals … Spitting Image s13e6
Well, John, we’d like to present you with this carriage clock. Spitting Image s16e4, Kenneth Clarke with cabinet to John Major
The Unexplained: These are the great mysteries of our age. The Conservative Party owes £19 million to the Royal Bank of Scotland. The bank has made no attempt to repossess their headquarters. No-one knows why. Curiously, the chairman of the Royal Bank of Scotland is Lord Young. Spitting Image s17e2
The Conservative Party always in time forgives those who were wrong. Indeed often, in time, they forgive those who were right. Iain Macleod, cited The Spectator 21st February 1964
The differences in the conferences reflect the fundamental difference between the two organisations. The Tory Party is financed by banks and big business. Its economic strategy is to protect profits and its ideology is based therefore on the most relentless legal and moral disciplines for those who do the work. The Labour Party came into being to represent trade unions in parliament. The unions still have the decisive vote on policy, on the National Executive and on finance. The difference between the parties is in the class base of their origins and their support. Employers vote Tory; workers vote Labour. Of course individuals from each section cross over to the other side, but the class differential between the parties is plain for all to see. Paul Foot, article November 1991, ‘Will Labour Make a Difference?’
The Tories happily and unitedly cling to office as long as they can. Their current discontent is caused by the inability of their economic system to solve its own dreadful crises – their ‘economic recovery’ for instance, on which so much of their rhetoric is now based, is disintegrating in front of their eyes. The tax cuts they promised turn out to be tax increases. Their ‘remedies’ – union bashing and privatisation – have been employed to the full, with no noticeable benefit to anyone except the mega rich.
No longer able to balance their books by bashing unions and the poor, they have turned to bashing the hallowed middle classes. Even mortgage relief, that enormous Thatcherite subsidy for homeowners, has been breached. In anguish as they contemplate losing their seats, Tory MPs lash out at any target which presents itself. Europe and foreigners everywhere, the BBC, each other. Paul Foot, article July/August 1995, ‘The Government That Devoured Itself’
Yet at this moment when the future is full of possibility, the Conservative Party insists that we can do nothing together that might improve our circumstances and exploit our vitality. We have no choice but to obey the injunctions of the genre of market capitalism the Conservatives have developed over the past 18 years. Our public institutions, if they cannot be privatised, must be made to ape those in the private sector ... This is an extraordinary argument. It supposes that the present is unimprovable. Will Hutton, The State to Come
The Conservatives’ focus on a narrow, book-keeper’s conception of efficiency neglects all those spillover dynamics in our society. ibid.
Conservative ideal of freedom and progress: everyone to have an unfettered opportunity of remaining exactly where they are. Geoffrey Madan
Some fellows get credit for being conservative when they are only stupid. Kim Hubbard
A conservative is a man who believes that nothing should be done for the first time. Alfred E Wiggam
The goal of conservative rulers around the world, led by those who occupy the seats of power in Washington, is the systematic rollback of democratic gains, public services, and common living standards around the world. Michael Parenti
[Mervyn] King expressed great concern at Conservative leaders’ lack of experience ... Cameron and Osborne have only a few advisors and seemed resistant to reaching out beyond their small inner circle. US diplomatic cable 17th February 2010; viz Wikileaks
All conservatism is based upon the idea that if you leave things alone you leave them as they are. But you do not. If you leave a thing alone you leave it to a torrent of change. G K Chesterton, Orthodoxy
Conservatives do not believe that the political struggle is the most important thing in life … The simplest of them prefer fox-hunting – the wisest religion. Quintin Hogg aka Lord Hailsham, The Case for Conservatism, 1947
A great party is not to be brought down because of a scandal by a woman of easy virtue and a proved liar. Quintin Hogg aka Lord Hailsham
Boris Johnson loves playing games ... Boris Johnson is a formidable and unorthodox competitor. Boris Johnson: The Irresistible Rise, BBC 2013
The Eton- and Oxford-educated mayor of London has routinely broken the conventional rules of politics. ibid.
The tape was a recording of Guppy telephoning to ask Johnson to find the home address of an inquisitive journalist whom Guppy wanted to scare off. ibid.
Cameron excluded Johnson from his inner circle. ibid.
Johnson once more beat Livingstone. ibid.
Liberalism is trust of the people tempered by prudence. Conservatism is distrust of the people tempered by fear. William E Gladstone
Success makes men rigid and they tend to exalt stability over all the other virtues; tired of the effort of willing they become fanatics about conservatism. Walter Lippmann
The future of Conservatism lies in our beliefs and values, not by throwing them away. We need to shed associations that bind us to past failures, but hold faith with those things that make us Conservatives. Iain Duncan Smith
Conservatism is the blind and fear-filled worship of dead radicals. Mark Twain
The modern conservative is engaged in one of man’s oldest exercises in moral philosophy; that is, the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness. John Kenneth Galbraith, Stop the Madness, interview Toronto Globe and Mail 6 July 2002
The real division is not between conservatives and revolutionaries but between authoritarians and libertarians. George Orwell, letter to Malcolm Muggeridge
We are simultaneously told that there are no choices about how we organise ourselves collectively. Can we have no other institutions and practices but those we have inherited or had imposed upon us by the simplistic verities of Conservative rule? Will Hutton, The State to Come
This callous crypto-fascist Conservative government … Alan Bleasdale, GBH: It Couldn’t Happen Here starring Robert Lindsay & Lindsay Duncan & Michael Palin & Julie Walters & Tom Georgeson & Andrew Schofield & Jane Danson & David Ross et al, director Robert Young, Michael to Franky
Conservatism discards Prescription, shrinks from Principle, disavows Progress; having rejected all respect for antiquity, it offers no redress for the present, and makes no preparation for the future. Benjamin Disraeli, Coningsby, 1844
‘A sound Conservative government,’ said Taper, musingly, ‘I understand: Tory men and Whig measures.’ ibid.
It seems to me a barren thing this Conservatism – an unhappy cross-breed, the mule of politics that engenders nothing. ibid.
The Conservative Party’s Primrose League. Amanda Vickery, Suffragettes: Forever! The Story of Women and Power II, BBC 2015
On 11th June 1987 Margaret Thatcher and the Conservative Party won a third term with a majority of 101. Thatcher: The Downing Street Years III: Midnight in Moscow, Twilight in London, BBC 1993
In October 1989 the Conservative Party celebrated Margaret Thatcher’s 64th birthday and her tenth anniversary as Prime Minister at the party conference. Yet just over a year later those same colleagues who clapped and cheered her in public would force her from office. Thatcher: The Downing Street Years IV: Wielding the Knife