The Not So Strange Death of Tory England

Todays' Grauniad gives an extract from Geoffrey Wheatcroft's "The Strange Death of Tory England".

Douglas Hurd for a moment seemed the likely successor, but he was much flustered about his origins, as the son of a lord, educated at Eton and Cambridge. He resorted to poor-mouthing, as the Irish say, insisting that his father had only farmed 500 "not particularly good" acres. When pressed, he lost his composure completely: "This is inverted snobbery. I thought I was running for leader of the Conservative party, not some demented Marxist sect."

That's Douglas Hurd, ex Foreign Secretary, who

as chairman of NatWest, .. was involved, on behalf of NatWest Markets, in assisting the privatisation of the Serbian telecoms industry. Actually, some Serbian newspapers are speculating that, if it weren't for the millions of pounds that this generated for Serbia's equivalent of Britain's Treasury, it would have been impossible for Milosevic to have waged his war in Kosovo.

How easy it is to leap from running for leader of the Conservative Party to supporting a Genocidal conflict.

How easy it is to mistake the Conservative Party for a "demented Marxist sect."